How do people use Listen Notes?

Listen Notes is the best podcast search engine and directory that you can find on the Internet. It's very versatile. This blog post lists some most common use cases of Listen Notes.

IMDb for podcasts

Many people use Listen Notes as "IMDb for podcasts".

Essentially, people don't go to IMDb to watch movies there. They go to IMDb to learn more about a particular movie, e.g., ratings, actors, trivias...

Similarly, many people don't come to Listen Notes to listen to podcasts. They visit Listen Notes to learn more about a particular podcast, e.g., what is this podcast about, what are the offical social accounts, how popular this podcast is, what are similar podcasts out there...

Content curators / Journalists / Students

As podcast becomes an important media format, some in-depth conversations / analysis only exist in podcasts.

Many content curators (e.g., weekly email newsletters) use Listen Notes to find podcast episodes related to specific topics, then recommend some episodes for their audience. Listen Later is an ideal tool for this purpose. Here are some great examples of curated playlists:

People can easily subscribe to those playlists via RSS on their favorite podcast player apps, which is like listening to a podcast with curated episodes from other podcasts.

Similarly, journalists use Listen Notes to help prepare their own writings, e.g., doing research on a certain topic or a particular person.

And some students use Listen Notes to help their course projects or their own research (graduate students).

Podcasters

Email from a podcaster

When a podcaster wants to interview a guest, they typically need to do research on their guest first. In particular, they find past interviews of this guest to learn more about him/her and to avoid asking similar questions again.

Where can they find those interviews? Well, turns out there are a lot in podcasts :)

Hardcore listeners

Hardcore listeners typically subscribe to a lot of podcasts. Gradually, they feel that they can’t catch up all the backlog of episodes. Too much contents!

But they also feel that they “run out” of contents, despite of huge backlog of episodes. They want to listen to more contents, but they don’t want to subscribe to yet another podcast.

So some of them are using Listen Notes as a desktop podcast player, typically during their work hours when they use a desktop computer. They search for certain topics, find some episodes, then listen on the web browser.

To be frank, I didn’t build Listen Notes as a podcast player, yet. But I got some good suggestions how to improve the player feature on Listen Notes.

More and more people use Listen Later as an episode-centric way to consume podcasts. Don’t subscribe to yet another podcast. Just add individual episodes to the playlist.

Casual listeners

And there are casual listeners. There are a lot of them, way more than hardcore listeners. Casual listeners try out Listen Notes, find something interesting, listen, then move on. They just don’t bother downloading a podcast player app to their phone or subscribe to a podcast. People don’t download new apps nowadays.

People who haven’t listened to podcasts

Most people in the world haven’t listened to podcasts yet. Many people come to Listen Notes from Google search results. They try to find contents to consume. They don’t realize that podcasts have such rich contents that they can listen to. Now, they find podcasts, listen, then move on. Maybe they’ll come back later :)

Teachers

Where can you learn things? Books, documentaries, YouTube, magazines, and of course, podcasts! Teachers give students reading lists (books / articles), or playlists (podcasts).

People who look for promo code of products

This use case is very very interesting! For example: promo code casper.

Advertisers / Ads agencies / PR / Marketing agencies

Advertising on podcasts is very effective. 61% of listeners buy products from podcast ads. But how do advertisers find specific podcasts to sponsor? For example, how could you find “all podcasts that talk about cricket” without using a podcast search engine like Listen Notes?

Many PR / Marketing agencies are using Listen Notes to help their clients find podcasts to be a guest on. Nowadays, podcasts just become a powerful PR / marketing channel for brands. In addition, they also use Listen Alerts to track if their clients are actually interviewed or mentioned in latest podcasts.

In sum, professionals use Listen Notes as a Podcast Contacts Database and a Podcast Mentions Monitoring tool.

Networking

People in the tech industry are doing a lot of podcast interviews nowadays. Oftentimes, before I meet a VC, I would just search on Listen Notes to binge listen to all of their podcast interviews — most of famous VCs were interviewed here and there in podcasts. Similarly, celebrity-level startup founders are on podcasts a lot. If you want to do your homework before meeting those famous people, listening to their podcast interviews is a good start.

And…

Check out Listen Notes to search for potential candidates & networking opportunity #SourceCon @SourceCon @jimstroud #podcasts pic.twitter.com/ozN4h8irQR
— Marc Spiron (@IronSpiron) September 26, 2018

Build podcast apps using Listen API

We provide Listen API for developers to access the most comprehensive podcast database on the Internet. Developers just need to focus on the most exciting part of building an app, rather than doing tedious work of building & maintaining a podcast database.

You can find some apps using Listen API here. Some applications built with Listen API:

Do I miss any use case of Listen Notes?

BTW, it's very easy to use Listen Notes together with many online publishing platforms.