Pandora now offering recommendations for podcasts

Pandora has gone into the podcast recommendation business, overnight rolling out beta access to select listeners on mobile devices.

The company says it will widen access over coming weeks.

As of June 2018, there were 550,000 podcasts in existence – covering a multitude of topics.

Discovering these would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack, according to Pandora.

Called the Podcast Genome Project, it uses technology and human curation for personalised recommendations – just like its decade-old Music Genome recommendations.

It covers music, comedy, news, sports, business, technology, entertainment, true crime, kids, health, science and politics.

It makes its recommendations via1500 assets, including MPAA ratings, timely and evergreen topics, production style, content type and host profile.

It also “ranks” a podcast from listener response, via thumbs, skips and replays.

“It might feel like podcasts are ubiquitous, but, 83% of Americans aren’t yet listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, and a majority of them report that’s because they simply don’t know where to start,” said Pandora CEO Roger Lynch.

“Making podcasts – both individual episodes and series – easy to discover and simple to experience is how we plan to greatly grow podcast listening while simultaneously creating new and more sustainable ways to monetize them.”

At launch, publisher partners included APM, Gimlet, HeadGum, Libsyn, Maximum Fun, NPR, Parcast, PRX+PRI, reVolver, Slate, The New York Times, The Ramsey Network, The Ringer, WNYC Studios, and Wondery.

Pandora’s third-quarter earnings report last week showed it exceeded Wall Street expectations with revenue for the quarter of US$417.6 million and losses of $15.5 million, and paid subscriptions rising to 30% of revenue.