Future of Malayalam Podcast
Hello Everyone,
My name is Krish. I’m the host of the Malayalam podcast “The Malayali Podcast”. I’m happy to announce that my podcast has reached 25k listeners in just 5 months and I’d like to thank all my listeners for your wonderful support. You guys made this possible for me. I thank each one of you from the bottom of my heart.
I started my podcasting journey in July 2020. The pandemic changed my thoughts. Being home and doing nothing for long hours made me feel very low. So I decided to use my time productively by doing something that I love.
Podcasting is not a new concept to me. I started listening to podcasts in 2013. At the time most of them were in English and I could hardly find one in Malayalam. When a few started in the later years they all happened to be religious podcasts.
It was in 2016 that I discovered a malayalam voice blog hosted by Mohanlal on SoundCloud, which is actually the first form of what we call a podcast now. As an IT professional I was very excited and interested to learn the technology behind it. I went through so many blogs to understand it better and realized that most of the blogging platforms are paid. Also, the sound cloud was not flexible for beginners. However, I decided to give it a try but couldn’t get a positive response.
That’s when, last year, I happened to listen to Garyvee talking about the growing opportunities for podcasters. According to him, the podcast is going to be the next big thing.
Is Podcasts really the future?
Most people wonder how Malayalam podcasts are going to get a gig since we have YouTube for everything. The fun fact is that most Indians watch youtube for listening to music, and the big example is TSeries. For those who don’t know, TSeries is a music channel that is the most viewed YouTube channel in the world. This led Spotify to start its own audio streaming services in India in 2019 and thus it became a big game-changer. As a result, we now have, not just Spotify but many other apps like Gaana, Jio saavn,Wynk, amazon music etc for streaming music. Recently Jio bought Saavn and launched a podcast and Amazon launched a podcast in their Amazon music app. Recently Ganna also started streaming podcasts from their platform. So it’s clear by now that the podcast industry is growing and more people are listening to them. If you closely look, you can see that most of the Youtube channels are simply the video versions of a podcast (video Podcasting). If they decide to make their content available in an audio format, there will be a massive change in the Malayalam Podcast industry.
Most of the English and Hindi YouTubers have podcasts, along with YouTube where they post trimmed content on youtube and full content on podcast. However, it is not the same in Kerala. Here the major focus is on earning money by generating more views even at the cost of the quality of the content! It’s not fair. Most of them are aware of podcasting but are still not ready to make a change. Studies show that people, nowadays, are not ready to watch videos for more than 10mintues straight. This will definitely create a demand for podcasts in the future.
The podcast is like On-Demand radio. Podcasting combines the freedom of blogging with the technology of audio. You can listen to a podcast according to your timing. The Internet makes podcast more user friendly. You can simply listen to a Malayalam podcast on any podcasting application from your smartphone. You can also listen to a podcast of your choice and follow their updates by subscribing to them through the app. You will receive a notification whenever a new episode is uploaded. You shall also have an option to download the episodes and listen to them at any time. My personal favorite podcasting app is Pocket casts, which is ad-free.
There is a growing community of people who love to listen to the radio for a long time, while traveling, or while doing some work. Still, there are many among us who prefer to play youtube videos, not for watching but for simply listing to them. This is where the importance of podcast comes in. We can listen to a podcast for either 5 minutes or for 3 hours. Comparing to video creation podcasting is much cheaper too. All you need is a good microphone (which will cost around 3–10k) and this is the only investment you will have to make.
Most of the Malayalam podcasts are created out of passion and not for money. However, if the listening count increase in the future it shall become more profitable than youtube. In the US, Germany, Uk, and Australia podcasters make more money than YouTubers.
The big news is yet to come. As per the sources, Facebook is planning to build an audio streaming platform and if it’s true, we can expect it from 2021. The podcast industry is finally taking off. If 2020 was such a long-awaited quantum leap, then 2021 will be the year of revolution in the Malayalam podcast industry.
