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Comment by nbardy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the bubble is bursting at all. If anything its maturing. It's not working for large companies. But I now listen to podcasts more than I read books and I learn more that way as well. Most of these podcasts come from small independent sources. Human conversation was how stories were spread for thousands of years, until the printing press. Now we have the technology to share information through conversation, but with the same reach as written language. Among my group of friends, talking about what podcasts we've read has become very similar to the old conversations we had about boost. The best podcasts are in depth often niche discussions similar to books. The don't require the production level of TV, which is great because a lot of great podcasts don't have a large enough audience to support that cost. They require time, and expertise to produce, not much money.

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>They require time, and expertise to produce, not much money.

At some point though, time and expertise are money. I'll do an interview-style/conversational podcast as a hobby or as one of the many little side things I do for my day job. But you start talking about multi-day production efforts and that's not something I'm just going to do for free.

Conversational podcasts about some niche topic and Radiolab both have their place. But there are real costs associated with production values.

Podcasts with high production value are generally inferior to podcasts with low production value, I've found. When the person talking is interesting the podcast is good -- but when they need to add bells and whistles and sound effects I find I get annoyed.

Agreed and I think the high production podcasts are definitely hitting a bit of a bubble. But my favorite podcasts are ones that always have different guests and I think that category has a lot of growing to do. The expertise required for the guests is only the one they already have. For example a nutritionist just has to come on and talk about nutrtion. Something they do for daily anyway.

For me personally, producing a 20-25 minute interview/conversation podcast on some topic hits the sweet spot for my own podcasts. It's not a lot of work to record, some light editing/automated intro/outro/posting, get a transcription done, post that with some show notes on a blog. Done. It's no more than a few hours of actual work.

Frankly, the biggest job is scheduling the guests which is one reason I tend to do the recordings mostly at events.

Radiolab is a bit too far in the other direction. I can't stand listening to it.

Radiolab can indeed be a bit polarizing. I mostly like it but know at least a couple of people who are put off by the various audio cute-siness or whatever the right word is.

It is better now than it used to be. In the early days the effects they would add were so heavy handed. I used to feel like every 2-3 seconds some audio effect clip was playing.

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