The Chinese “podcast” industry isn’t really podcasting as Americans think of it, but it is fascinating

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 211, published May 28, 2019.

We’re goin’ real deep on China this week, so the newsletter is going to be structured a little differently than usual. First, some news bites.

Although there is a lot of third-party content on the app, most of the attention given by the platform will be on the exclusive content that it produces itself. The plight of Chinese podcasting is like what you might get if you’d had a successful Luminary since 2012. Which raises an interesting question: If Luminary has appeared then and Spotify has started to focus a lot on podcasting before Serial, what would the U.S. podcasting market look like today? In my opinion, many of the concerns from the U.S. podcast community on the power of the platform mentioned in Hot Pod have similarly plagued the Chinese podcast community for a long time. In this regard, U.S. podcasting at this moment may resonate with us.

In my understanding, the Western podcasting world has always inherited the spirit of “Web 2.0” — free, openness, shared cyberspace, etc. — which is often described as the “decentralization” of the Internet. That is to say, there is no powerful platform that controls the open podcasting environment. China’s audio market has been platform-centric since services like Ximalaya FM formed in 2012, meaning that the platforms’ preference decides what kind of programs can get recommended opportunities and their development strategy determines what kind of business model can get more support. Those development strategies have driven the market. A few years ago, these major audio platforms found that simply providing podcasters with hosting services — and then relying on user-generated content to draw traffic in exchange for advertising — would not work. (Generally speaking, audio is still far less popular than video here.) So they tried new business models, with the Pay for Knowledge model being one of the successes. But what is less well known is that, although Ximalaya FM is known for its Pay for Knowledge business built on subscriptions, it’s also China’s largest audiobook distributor. It has the authorization of 70 percent of China’s audiobook copyright holders and thus is close to a monopoly on audiobook sales. Which means that Ximalaya FM is not only the “YouTube of audio” here in China — it’s also China’s Audible.

In many people’s mind, the difference between “podcast” and “audio” is not clear. This is why when many people say “the Chinese audio market is booming,” they are likely to think of Pay for Knowledge, audiobook, or other kinds of audio content instead of podcasts. In the U.S., it has become a market consensus to treat “podcasts” alone as a medium. The mix-up in China, however, will also affect the development of podcasts. It will make the market here unable to see the value of podcasting.

Release notes

• Crooked Media has a new narrative nonfiction series: This Land, hosted by Rebecca Nagle, about “two crimes nearly two centuries apart provide the backbone to an upcoming 2019 Supreme Court decision that will determine the fate of five tribes and nearly half the land in Oklahoma.”
• Dan Weissman’s Arm and A Leg is coming back for a new season on June 4, with a brand new co-production partner, Kaiser Health News.
• Pushkin Industries’ latest project, out June 5, is called Solvable. Worth noting: the show is being developed in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation.
• I have another preview piece out for Vulture. Check it.