The Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s most senior Audience Researcher and Media Analyst Peter Niegel presented the results of an internal podcast research project at RadioDays Asia.
After embarking on a podcast strategy, Denmark’s national broadcaster wanted to understand where the growth sectors were for their podcasts by using data to identify podcast formats and techniques that would increase downloads.
Niegel and his research colleagues used data mining from open podcast ranker source data to look for gaps in the Danish market compared with other markets.
“We did a textual analysis grid of the data and identified potential categories of growth. We found four main categories where we could increase listening by analysing our own audience listening and comparing with podcast listening in other markets,” said Niegel
The growth areas identified were:
- True Crime
- Humour
- Health
- Business
In Niegel’s case study he showed that the analysis identified characteristics of the True Crime genre as: journalistic methods, investigative, attempting to solve the case. The podcasts built narrative tension and momentum.
The mood of that podcast genre is described as ‘the joy of disgust.’ Identifying mood helped to communicate ideas to the producers for improving their own podcasts.
Another characteristic of the most recent styles in that genre was that “authenticity has decreased” and “production techniques that create suspense have increased in successful podcasts in the genre.”
“Creativity and suspense is more important than pure truth at the moment… Creating an emotion in the listeners – shock, disgust or delight is important from our analysis.”
Having two hosts in that genre works well. “The listener has a place in the podcast… they talk to the listener.”
“Humour is also part of the genre at times, it lightens the mood at different moments…. The hosts use dialog to describe photographs and, where possible, they use of real clips from news or courts.”
The main target group for the True Crime genre is females 30-50 and youth 15-25.
“This type of analysis helped our podcast teams produce content that has driven an increase in listenership…
“They knew about making crime podcasts, but they found that they could add a narrative story arc to tell the story and create the suspense,” said Niegel.
A deep analysis of what works and the production characteristics of podcasts is a good way to improve the success of your podcasts, according to Niegel.