Discovering UK podcasts

I do love a good podcast. It can be hard to find one though.

Discovery is something that plagues the podcast community. There are just so few places that can deliver recommendations at scale.

It's one of the reasons that Matt and I started the British Podcast Awards - we thought there was real benefit in creating something that shined a light on British podcasts.

At the moment the core discovery method is through Apple Podcasts editorial and charting systems.

Editorial is shown in the carousel at the top of the Apple Podcasts home, in the New and Notable sections and in the topic carousels. This is all managed by a very small number humans across the world with bulging inboxes.

The chart consists of an overall Top 200 (for individual episodes and channels) but they also provide charts based on each of the podcast categories. These charts are not the most downloaded podcasts, but instead show momentum. It seems to be a weighted average of new subscriptions for the last week, with a higher weight put on the last 24 hours

It's why you see the "oh my god I'm at number 50" tweets for your mate with a newly launched podcast, before it drifts off the radar completely.

Apple's activity has the greatest impact for the podcast community. iOS devices deliver the vast majority of downloads, even though the number of Android devices far outstrips it. Having a podcast app - theirs - front and centre, coupled with the charts/curation has led to this lead.

There's still considerable limits to its efficacy though. If you're a new entrant, breaking into the charts is harder and harder and there's a limit to what Apple's team can review for editorial featuring.

Outside of Apple