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Content discovery has evolved dramatically, podcast discovery remains stuck in the past. While streaming services, search engines, and AI tools have revolutionized how we find music, videos, and information, finding the perfect podcast episode still relies largely on methods established over a decade ago. DeepCast CEO Lucas Dickey explains the problem and shares how his company is pioneering a platform providing podcast discovery solutions.
Despite the podcast industry's explosive growth, discovery mechanisms have barely changed in more than ten years. According to Dickey, podcast discovery currently hinges on three primary methods:
"Word-of-mouth accounts for like 87% of podcast discovery. Then there's top-down hierarchical navigation through broad categories, and finally editorially featured content," explains Dickey. "These are mechanisms that haven't really changed in quite a long time."
This stagnation has created a discovery bottleneck where even as podcast creation explodes, listeners default to a small pool of popular shows. Major platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts continue to rely on limited search capabilities that:
Dickey notes the consequences of this approach: "There's a lot of dependency on the podcaster to put the right keywords in their title and episode description. As opposed to the platform being able to infer some of the things on their behalf."
It’s these limitations that make effective podcast discovery solutions critical for both creators and listeners.
The podcast discovery problem stems from both technological and business challenges:
Historically, the technology to enable better discovery was prohibitively expensive, three orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today.
“People in 2017 had really great ideas about discoverability, but they had to use humans to accomplish it, and the data labeling is just an expensive endeavor," says Dickey.
Today, the landscape has changed dramatically in the post-ChatGPT era. Transcription now costs $1-2 per episode, with advanced AI and LLM capabilities available. We've passed the technology inflection point, what else could be causing the slowdown?
Despite technological advances, major platforms have been slow to innovate:
"Spotify could've been doing a lot of this stuff two years ago. They have a machine learning team, a data science team, topical or keyword-based navigation could be done. It just hasn't been a priority for them because podcasting is not where they make the best majority of their revenue."
When a few dominant platforms control the market, there’s a lack of incentive to change: "If it's working for them enough relative to their other businesses, which are predominantly music or video, then they're not necessarily gonna be motivated to innovate as much."
DeepCast has developed a comprehensive approach to fixing podcast discovery:
"We always said with DeepCast itself, that it solves a number of things for listeners. We're optimizing for both audiences that are 'trolling' or 'spearfishing' - those who loosely know what they want and those who know exactly what they want."
DeepCast offers multiple discovery paths:
Dickey highlights what makes DeepCast’s transcript search special: "Even our semantic search today is very unique to us. If you're looking for “that one thing that one person said”, you can try searching that way. If you know it was on a given podcast, you can narrow it down to a podcast and then do the relevant semantic search. Again, something no one else is doing."
The platform reduces the commitment barrier for potential listeners through:
"A lot of folks want to buy into a given episode or a podcast, but the burden is relatively high. You're making a commitment to say, 'Oh, I'm gonna listen to this Hard Fork episode’ but it clocks in at an hour and fifteen minutes long, and your commute's only 30 minutes. Without some distillation, a listener is more likely just to skip on listening. If they land on that episode page while doing some discovery mechanism, and the distilled content is on there, it’s either motivating a listen or providing the knowledge from the episode."
DeepCast empowers listeners to share content and retain knowledge through multiple (and growing) features. These include
When first working on these features, Dickey said he asked himself the question:
"How do we kick start the flywheel effect of word-of-mouth?”
The answer he found?
“We put as many tools in the hands of listeners to be able to share content from that distillation or from the transcript and ideally in as many formats as possible."
DeepCast's approach is already showing significant impact for creators by optimizing their podcast creator workflow::
"The typical podcaster in post-production entering the marketing stage has 30 to 50 discrete steps. We had good anecdotal feedback from someone that said, 'This used to take me 31 steps. Post-DeepCast creator, I'm now down to 14 steps.' On a time basis, they said it was actually more like going from two hours to maybe twenty minutes to get things done."
Expediting the podcast creator workflow means more time for creators to focus on their marketing and content output, enabling better discovery by listeners and the jumpstarting the innovation for enhanced podcast discovery solutions.
DeepCast's comprehensive vision for the entire podcast ecosystem is different from the 90’s tech it was built off of, and rather revolutionary. Rather than incremental improvements to existing systems, we’re reimagining what podcast discovery solutions engage with listeners and how listeners find and engage with podcast content.
Dickey sums up the approach in one sentence: "It's discovery, distillation, dissemination, and personal knowledge retention. All of which are the core to what DeepCast is doing."
By addressing the fundamental limitations of podcast discovery and leveraging advances in AI and speech-to-text technology, and including innovative transcript search for podcasts and semantic podcast search capabilities, DeepCast is dedicated to unlocking the vast knowledge contained in the world's podcasts, making it more accessible and useful than ever before.
Want to experience a new way to discover podcasts? Visit DeepCast.fm to try the platform for yourself.
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