Happy new year!
2019 promises to be a game changer for podcasting, and even though I think we are the “slow food movement of media,” RadioPublic is moving fast.
You’ll be hearing soon about a remarkable roadmap of products, services, and partnerships — podcasters and listeners will be well served.
Before we step take our next steps forward, it’s a good moment to pause and reflect on 2018, our second full year here at RadioPublic.
Here are some highlights:
- Our talented tech team released 58 (!) updates to our Android and iOS apps. If you haven’t yet, make sure to read Matt MacDonald’s release notes — a master of the form.
- Our curation and editorial work, led by our content strategist and the industry’s first podcast librarian Ma’ayan Plaut, made a huge mark in featuring a diverse range of podcasts in 2018 — over 2,400 shows!
- We expanded our set of RadioPublic tools for podcasters and have seen remarkable growth in adoption, with thousands of podcasters signed up for RadioPublic accounts and enrolled in our Paid Listens program. Under the hood, we built a scalable system to streamline onboarding, verification, listening reports, and payment processing for participating podcasters.
- We made major UX and navigation improvements to the RadioPublic web landing pages and our Explore section (scroll down for some delightful curation).
- We introduced innovative new features, including in-app tipping, timestamping, and a new framework for Calls to Action (stay tuned for more of these arriving in 2019).
- On the partnership front, we introduced a new way to create and share playlists on RadioPublic with Podchaser, and introduced integrations with Libsyn and Anchor to give podcasters on those platforms a direct publishing, marketing, and monetization path into RadioPublic.
- Our partnership with Bose is hitting its stride as we’ve been selected as a launch partner for Bose’s new augmented reality SDK and platform, focused on RadioPublic’s forthcoming HearMarks™ feature for bookmarking episodes with gesture controls.
- Over the summer we ran a successful equity crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform, raising $145,338 from 397 new ambassadors and stakeholders in the company. Thank you and welcome aboard!
We remain as excited and committed to our mission and vision and opportunity as ever. I am so grateful to our team, board, investors, partners, podcasters, and listeners for helping us make RadioPublic. Stay tuned!
