Why can't I discover podcasts by topics?
If I want to listen to podcast episodes that talk about growing a podcast business without any specific podcast in mind- how can I search for them? I am not aware of any means. Am I the only one who needs this feature?
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I was just thinking about the same thing! Like it would be nice to hear what different people think about the same topic, or how they went through similar things.
What topics were searching podcasts for? Is it as general as "growing a podcast", more more focused on getting some initial traction, or steps after that etc?
Maybe listennotes.com works for you?
I explored listennotes too. It's the best podcast search engine out there but again doesn't index on the 'topic' but rather factual metadata like text in the title, guest etc. Searching for "growing a podcast business" retrieves a bunch of podcasts about "growing a business".
Technically, deriving topic itself is a relatively complex ML/NLP task. There can be multiple topics per episode. Requires transcript availability/permissions to use from copyright owner.
I feel it could significantly improve discovery and user acquisition. The end result could look like this: each episode to have a mixture of topics like (eg-episode about growing a podcast business can be 20% startups, 60% podcasts, 5% growth etc..). Over many episodes, this topic distribution can be a portal for listeners to choose/revisit an episode of their choice.
If any podcasters are willing to share a a sample of podcast transcripts, I could give it a shot and share the results with you.
That's very interesting. Could you use speech to text to get the transcripts? For topic modelling of the conversations, do you know of prior applications where it worked?
If you end up getting it working, please let me know! I guess it's not a validated idea that people want to find specific episodes & back-reference podcasts by topic (besides us), but it could be hugely interesting to unlock all that content.
I'm wondering how well podcasts are indexed right now. Podcasters would want to grow their reach, so why don't they populate metadata on mentioned topics?
Topic modeling is very well established as a technique, so given transcripts, im pretty sure it will be able to find a composition of topics discussed in the podcast.
the idea validation is what is lacking to go and implement this. iv heard in other podcasts (indiehackers with rob walling for example) where podcasters wished they had a catalog of the topics they have discussed either for growing audience or for repurposing content into blogs/books or just SEO. but how desperately they need it is a question mark.
On the flip side, as users, we are so spoilt for content that only hardcore fans may actually end up using such a tool to indulge their specific interests.
personally, Iv several times that i could find episodes that spoke about soft-topics like ''podcasts about balancing work and fitness', 'podcaster speaking about their growth strategy' etc, which is currently not possible unless its in the title/show notes.
What do you mean by "we are so spoilt for content"? I think people discover most interesting content by accident on random topics (like following a specific podcasts) - which as you said may be what most want.
That's fun, but I find it hard to discover this kind of high-quality, not-well-indexed content when searching for it specifically.