Mapping the factors that determine engagement in podcasting: design from the users and podcasters’experience

Abstract

The current media ecosystem offers enormous participatory possibilities to media audiences that, in this way, have the opportunity to engage in the co-creation of media discourse in ways unknown during the 20th century. Following the marketing 2.0 theories, the creation of attractive user experiences is considered as one of the aspects that the media increasingly take into consideration in order to get profitable content. The aim of this research is to detect the factors that influence engagement in podcasting, a digital and interactive medium that, due to its transmedia and mostly amateur nature, develops dynamics of permanent connection between media creators and listeners. By conducting a total of 17 in-depth semi-structured interviews with pioneers of the medium, podcasters and listeners, a total of 13 factors that determine user engagement were identified. These factors are integrated in three groups: medium-centered (technology, asynchrony, topics, genres and formats, and podcast subcommunity’s size), user-centered (participatory culture, consumption situation and number of subscriptions, knowledge on the topic and about the podcast subcommunity, their own relevance in the podcastphere, and the perceived relevance about their participation), and podcaster-centered (skills, attitude and tone). These factors maintain relations of interoperability that build a grammar of engagement of the medium. This study provides some clues that can be exploited by commercial media that are opting for podcasting in order to build innovative experiences of interaction with their users with the purpose of increasing their audiences.

The relationship between environmental context and attentional engagement in podcast listening experiences

“…Research has identified an individual's participation with a podcast at the point of consumption, either directly by interacting with the creators on social media or indirectly by researching references made during the podcast, as a key factor in a listener's user-centered engagement (García-Marín, 2020 ). It also highlighted how the environmental, situational, and social context in which a podcast listening experience takes place can be a limiting factor in the listener's ability to engage in these forms of participatory engagement.…”

“…This data was collected as a quantitative measure of different aspects of participants' podcast listening engagement, adapted from the aspects of podcast listening engagement metrics originally presented by García-Marín ( 2020 ) and Tobin and Guadagno ( 2022 ) in order to reflect the present study's interest in environmental context. The data collected in this part of the study was analyzed to calculate the total number of responses provided by individual participants for each aspect of podcast listening engagement .…”

“…These consisted of the amount of time spent listening, the settings in which episodes of listening take place, the editorial format of the podcast, the device(s) used to listen, and social aspects of listening including social and parasocial engagement. García-Marín ( 2020 ) conducted qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with listeners, podcasters, and pioneers in the medium, identifying 13 factors that determine engagement in podcasting. The factors were categorized into three groups of medium-centered, user-centered, and podcast-centered engagement.…”

La red social X como canal de difusión del Podcasting

“…Estos datos derivan de variedad y extensión de dispositivos con conectividad a la red, de la aparición de los altavoces inteligentes y asistentes de voz, de las plataformas de streaming de audio (Martínez-Costa y Legorburu-Hortelano, 2021) o, entre otros, de la expansión del contenido sonoro en Internet a partir de 2020, coincidiendo con la pandemia de COVID19. Todo esto, como adelantaban Rime et al (2022), propicia una nueva experiencia de la escucha y la aparición de contenidos sonoros con experiencias más inmersivas, más directas y relacionales con el sonido (Piñeiro-Otero y Pedrero-Esteban, 2022) que se asocian a empoderamiento, participación o interacción, característicos del espacio digital y las redes sociales (García-Marín, 2020).…”

Zooming Along Through the Pandemic: Our Experiences with Virtual Biobanking Conferences and Workshops

“…This was in line with prior observations in the design of online courses, as well as the general communication in the digital environment. 9,10 However, it also became clear that an online attendance was subject to competing priorities, especially as it was practically difficult to get away from ongoing local work and often home activities. Keeping the audience's attention was paramount to a successful meeting.…”