A podcast would first need some kind of traction first. This could be done by testing out pilots with various interest groups, or releasing them to a decently populous audience on something like Reddit, and see which kind/subject gets the best feedback first. After, you can slowly release the podcast as you grow the fanbase/population base. At this point, Patreon would probably be helpful, as the few listeners you have are probably pretty dedicated listeners. At the same time, you would want to grow your social outlets at the same time, finding stories using them, tweeting when stories come out, and getting involved in the community that the podcast is about. Eventually, with some luck, the podcast will grow to a stage where it can be supported by ads/sponsored content. As you grow larger, you can probably shift off of things like Patreon so you no longer need listeners to support you in order to grow, but they are still helpful. At this point, podcasting can probably be a full time job.

The podcast is essentially about a person observing a cow and its surroundings for 11 hours, starting at 6am, breaking for lunch, and then going until the host loses track of the cow. The setting is in a very holy city in India. It starts with the host just sitting next to a cow, observing what it is doing, what people around it are doing. He comments that the cows are treated like regular people, walking into shops, lying down, being avoided by vehicles, etc. In between his observations, people sometimes come around to ask him what he’s doing or where he’s from, such as the man at the end who sings for him. During his observations, he’ll just comment into a sound recorder, where the listener can hear the background. From this background, we sadly only heard the cow moo once. However, there are other interesting things going on, such as a couple hundred extras there for a Bollywood dance shoot or something similar to that. The episode ends with the host losing track of the cow after listening to someone singing.

Here is the link to the production schedule.

The podcast is something I listen to fairly regularly, so I just listened to the latest episode, which I hadn’t listened to yet. It’s a relatively popular podcast, especially since it’s about how design interacts with the world and that’s something I’m interested in.

The main takeaway points are that: podcasting is booming recently, like a lot of social media has been. Similar to social media, in the early days of Facebook and Myspace, you would just go onto a friend’s page to see how cool it looked or poke them or post on their wall. Now, it’s all professional photographs and sponsored posts for anyone with a decent following. Podcasting is following a similar route: in the early days, it was a bunch of people just talking about stuff, kind of amateur, nothing really professionally done. Since then, production quality has gone up significantly, with people having easy access to editing software and studio-quality microphones. Now, the market is also very saturated with different types of podcasts, and in order to appeal to people they generally have to have good production quality and something worth listening to, whether it be professional advice or some sort of comedy. In order to avoid “podfade,” our group would have two choices: either never start a podcast (which we can’t do anymore) or to keep the same podcast going. With the format of our podcast, since we interview different people about different aspects of the pandemic, we would have quite a few stories to cover before running out of content.