The rise of the ‘nefariously B2B’ podcast

Howdy, and welcome to Decoder! I’m David Pierce, editor-at-large of The Verge. As you could have seen, we’re dropping some additional episodes within the feed this week. You’ll have Nilay again on Friday and for subsequent week, as we run towards the top of the yr.

However I’m actually excited to be right here with you all at this time as a result of I’m getting to speak about certainly one of my favourite issues: podcasts. There’s one thing unusual taking place as of late within the podcast world — nicely, really, there are type of quite a lot of issues taking place. It’s been a wild yr.

One factor I’ve seen just lately is the way in which corporations that deal in cash have been utilizing podcasts not simply as an leisure medium but in addition as a bizarre hybrid of promoting, thought management, and networking. It’s one thing we’ve seen for a number of years now with enterprise capital corporations, for instance: not solely do a lot of the top-level VC corporations have their very own podcasts but in addition individuals who do podcasts about enterprise capital find yourself going into it after assembly and speaking to all these of us.

It’s type of a bizarre, sophisticated net that goes each methods, and it’s not getting any much less bizarre or easier when you add stuff like crypto and politics to the combination. So I requested Nick Quah to come back on the present to assist me untangle all of it. Lately, Nick is the podcast critic for Vulture, which is certainly one of The Verge’s company siblings right here at Vox Media. He initially began the podcast publication Scorching Pod again in 2014, so he’s been following these items for a very long time and actually is aware of what he’s speaking about.

I actually needed to know what he’s seeing on this house, and I had so many questions. Why would a serious funding agency like Elliott Administration make a podcast to make a degree? What’s the level of beginning your individual podcast in 2024? Was this actually “the podcast election?” Are all podcasts simply movies now? And does he have any thought what’s coming subsequent?

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