How might we reward podcast hosts with a fair income from their work?
BlogTalkRadio was one of the first platforms to support a true Creator Economy. We partnered with hosts on a flywheel of success:
- Educating hosts on podcast best practices elevated the quality of their shows →
- Boosted listener engagement 200% YoY →
- Increased advertising revenue 100% →
- Tripled host activation (creating 3+ episodes) raised Pro Subscription revenue 20%
Podcast Studio
The Studio is the heart of the BTR experience and it's the UI that hosts interact with during the highest stress moments of creating a podcast. Extensive user interviews and ride-alongs with our hosts revealed deep insights into user habits before, during, and after a live broadcast.
Key UX research insights:
- Producing a live interview for radio or podcast is a performance scenario that requires focus and preparation. It's stressful!
- Discoverability is key in a high-pressure operation
- Sound clips are used for pre-baked intro and outros.
- Multiple affordances for caller states help first-time hosts.
- Feedback about the show state.
The art direction was inspired by high-end Audio and video authoring applications. We wanted to convey a serious, professional-grade application for our hosts to work with.
Host Dashboard
By far the most common workflow we saw almost every host take in the dashboard was viewing the listen numbers for their content. Hosts wanted to see a quantifiable reward for their efforts. We surfaced these metrics and created new summary metrics in the dashboard to amplify the ROI for them.
Gamify Podcast Planning
The metrics were a useful indicator for the podcast health but they didn't provide the qualitative guidance that hosts needed to improve those numbers. The competitive landscape of support for hosts focused mostly on technical guidance for sound quality and distribution. There was no guidance on how to write a compelling script, structure the show intro, or write compelling titles that inspire the audience to listen.
We knew from our own metrics that the first 30 seconds of a podcast episode were the most critical for engaging your audience and getting them hooked. How might we help hosts make the most of that opportunity?
We built features, like Signal Strength, and Template Episodes to help improve the podcast content directly in the tools. We used some light gamification inspired by other apps and guided hosts toward creating complete and compelling podcast titles, descriptions, and introductions.
sequenceDiagram
participant A as Alice
participant J as John A->>J: Hello John, how are you? J->>A: Great!