Understanding The Three Types Of Podcasts

“Knock, Knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Someone without a podcast.”

“Wait, there’s still someone left who doesn’t have a podcast?”

When TV execs talked about peak TV a few years ago, they discussed the 450 or so original TV shows that were now on broadcast and streaming.

Now imagine this. By some counts, there are over a million podcasts!

Amid that flood of podcast shows, chaos seems to ensue.

So let’s bring some clarity to the flood of podcasts.

Let’s take those million or so podcasts and divide them into three basic types.

Type # 1 Podcasts That Inform

Type # 2 Podcasts That Persuade

Type # 3 Podcasts that Entertain

Let’s take a closer look at all three types and how they relate to the growing podcast universe and the needs and desires of listeners hungry for podcast content.

Type # 1 Podcasts That Inform

An argument can be made that in the early days of podcasting, informative podcasts were the pioneers in the industry. Long-time podcasts like Stuff You Should Know, Grammar Girl, Nutrition Diva, Hardcore History and more dotted the early podcast landscape with episodes on topics not available in other media formats.

In the early days, Leo Laporte began his tech podcast empire with This Week In Tech (TWIT) and Tech News Today.

A podcast about science fiction book genre, Sword And Laser, began in 2008 with hosts Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont and is close to 400 episodes.

As podcasts came into existence, their initial attraction to listeners was their ability to tackle subjects considered too niche by other media formats like television, radio, or journalism.

Even today, some of the most popular podcasts address topics simply too arcane for other media formats. For example, 99% Invisible is a consistently popular podcast about design. Business Wars is a Wondery podcast about the battle of companies in a specific industry, such as UPS vs FedEx or Pizza Hut vs Domino’s.

This “informational model” continues today because unlike radio or TV, there are restrictive time restraints. Podcasts can be six or 60 minutes. That’s another reason why YouTube has prospered as a place to learn everything from laying vinyl flooring to playing the acoustic guitar.

Longer-form informational podcasts like Freakonomics and Cautionary Tales also excel at immersive and mind-bending thought experiments that revel in the counterintuitive.

Today, short-form informational podcasts have blossomed. The award-winning Curiosity Daily podcast is relentlessly upbeat and can back up its marketing claims about making you smarter. In less than 10 minutes, you’ll get a unique mix of research-based life hacks, the latest science and technology news, and more. Curiosity Daily has a panoramic view with no topics out of bounds. For example, one day, it covers “The Zoomies” when your cat darts across the room for no apparent reason to why vision is important to babies in the womb. They even produce more behavior-based mini-stories such as a recent episode about “How to avoid not giving up after a mistake.”

Short Wave is a National Public Radio (NPR) podcast that gives us a sneak peek behind the science headlines — all in about 10 minutes, every weekday. It’s science for everyone, using a lot of creativity and a little humor.

Hosts Emily Kwong, Aaron Scott, and Scientist-In-Residence Regina G. Barber can do a sub -10-minute deep dive on subjects such as the woman who discovered radio waves emitted by dying stars called pulsars, how climate change affects certain breeds of chipmunks, the shaky benefits of multivitamin usage, and the myth of plastic recycling.

Type # 2 Podcasts That Persuade

Podcasts didn’t start off with a robust slate of political podcasts. Two things have happened to change the landscape. First, the American people have become as polarized as the earth’s magnetic fields and second, the election of — and then defeat of — Trump energized opposition forces.

Where the television has disintegrated into a minefield of screaming people who are more interested in demonizing others than dealing intelligently in a shared set of facts, podcasts have, for the most part, set the bar for a higher level of discourse with KCRW’s Left Right & Center, The Political Gabfest, Ken Rudin’s Political Junkie and the moderate’s refuge The Purple Principle.

When you listen to KCRW’s podcast Left Right & Center for the first time, it’s like bathing in ideas, civility, respectful disagreement and rhetorical chess play. KCRW is a Santa Monica CA-based NPR station with an impressive slate of podcasts.

The weekly podcast, which is about 55 minutes long, is now moderated by rotating hosts who all excel at keeping the podcast focused, articulate, insightful and, most of all, free from the vitriol of most other shows with talking heads from divergent political ideologies.

And true to the mission of the podcast, the host who is the “center” artfully points out the holes in the viewpoints of liberals and conservatives. From a flow perspective, Left Right & Center excels at escaping the mud pit of mutually destructive invective and seems to move to the next topic at just the right moment.

Information-rich shows like NYT’s The Daily and Vox’s Today Explained are top-rated podcasts and attempt a delicate balancing act of daily, investigative reporting with an earnest attempt at objectivity, which in today’s world is like balancing a knife at the end of your nose.

Certainly, there are extremist podcasts on both ends of the political spectrum, but unlike in TV where rhetorical combat is a ratings’ winner, podcasters tend to stay in their lane because audio only of screaming people is too much like that family Thanksgiving dinner in between football games.

Type # 3 Podcasts that Entertain

The grandparent of entertaining podcasts is the NPR radio show that morphed into a highly successful podcast, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. Even during COVID-19 restrictions, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! regularly topped the podcast rating charts and has done so for years. As large companies have jumped into the podcasting space, their hook invariably revolves around entertainment-type podcasts. When Amazon announced its podcast service, it did so with new podcasts being touted and most are entertainment podcasts — DJ Khaled, Dan Patrick and a true-crime show. Other large companies like Spotify are firing up new programming with celebrities leading a roster of standard interview shows. Of course, the popular Joe Rogan podcast has attracted a large audience for several years, but it remains to be seen if the comedian can continue unfettered on Spotify after Rogan had to apologize for blaming forest fires in Oregon on arson by leftist radicals, his misinformation episode on the COVID vaccine, and his fascination with transphobic commentary.

Finally, podcasts have excelled so far by positioning themselves in spaces that TV, radio and print typically ignore and simply are not that effective at covering. As larger companies begin to become significant content players in the podcasting space, there is a danger that podcasts gradually become homogenized and lose their distinctiveness. For every interchangeable celebrity interview podcast coming our way, we desperately need more unique shows like Intelligence Squared: U.S. Debates, All The Wiser, On The Media, No Stupid Questions, Sticky Notes, Tagline, and Hidden Brain.