David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…My view (I guess) is the boundaries are from a format side, it's definitely been blurred quite a lot for the right reasons. The better way to think about audiobooks and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly. One way to frame it instead would be podcasting is ad-supported audio, and audiobooks are paid audio. For you guys, I also happen to know, you spent so much time and effort on the research of that site. You could imagine that in the future, you have the ad-supported side of your podcast, the certain types of episodes, and you'd have for your subscribers the unlock where they get access to these kinds of deep dives, et cetera. Obviously, this subscription thing could be as simple as, hey, you're part of our other network, and it doesn't cost money, or you could pay gate it's all the way through. I think it's more of a business model. That's the big format differentiation. As we said, the quality, the mics we're using relative to an audiobook, there's no difference here. You're using high quality camera equipment. Also very similar to more professional styled and do-it-yourself equipment, editing, and all these things. It's getting more and more blurred. Yeah, which is so interesting. To us, we've lived this over the past eight years. What podcasting has unlocked, and how Spotify is bringing so many more people to the medium that weren't consuming before, is a mass audience for niche products. If we were authors and we wrote a book—and we get pitched all the time on writing a book—the business model for us does not make sense anymore, given the audience size that we have and the particular type of audience. We monetize so much better with the ad-supported content. But to make that unlock happen, it needed to become a mass medium. It's interesting to think about, would that change if audiobooks can access a mass audience in the same way? Yeah. Obviously, our view is, we eventually think audiobooks should be much, much larger than what they are today. Hundreds of millions of people who are actually listening to Audiobooks because the content is great rather than today with tens of millions of people.…

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