The US Surgeon General has declared mental health a “public health crisis.” The sense of loneliness felt by a reported 58% of Americans is apparently worsened by the increased use of television and social media, which has created a false sense of connection and belonging. Americans spend an average of more than 3 hours a day on social media, and Gen Z (18-25-year-olds) are some of the most avid users. Around one in four people from Gen Z report experiencing mental illness, and 73% report feelings of loneliness, up from 69% a year ago.
Studies have shown that hearing the human voice has a profound effect on a listener’s mood, which is why many people used to listen to the radio. While radio still exists today, podcasts are the next step in the spoken word medium. In a world where there are multiple digital channels to consume content across multiple devices, the opportunity for an on-demand digital medium like podcasts to explode in the mainstream and also participate in the larger $244B digital ad revenue pie is tremendous. However, the short-form “get to the quick” desire of digital consumers does not align with the long format, and poor search mechanisms currently prevent podcasts from that growth.
Like their parents and grandparents with radio, Gen Z is the main podcast listener demographic in the US, with 29 million of the 69 million Gen Zs in the US listening to podcasts. Most of them (21 million) say they listen to podcasts to improve their mood and help them feel less alone. According to a report by Spotify, podcasts serve as a “safe space” for them to process their feelings.
Allowing for a reprieve from the toxicity and comparison of social media, podcasts are helping listeners understand themselves better through conversational explorations of particular subjects by relatable hosts. They also evoke feelings of friendship and familiarity, which helps ease the loneliness they experience. “Podcasts are a vast untapped ocean of content that I have heard likened to a library full of plastic-wrapped books that can’t be read,” says Sherry Mills, Multimedia Artist, Co-Founder and CEO of digital audio AI startup Tree Goat Media. While the potential of podcasts is huge, as an easy-to-digest and produce medium that covers a huge range of subject matters, they often struggle with listener awareness and access.
The growing social role of podcasts shows how huge of a market there is for this medium. Podcasts have the power to connect people with the subjects they are passionate about in a manner that supports shared human connection. According to Tree Goat Media, there has been a huge jump in the number of podcasts in just a year. In 2022, there were 5 million podcast shows and 70 million episodes, up by 110% from the previous year. There are 464 million listeners worldwide, with 116 million in the US, and the global figure is expected to reach 500 million by 2025.
Despite the excellent growth potential, there is a problem regarding podcast accessibility. Data shows that 35% of people who don’t listen to podcasts, despite being aware of them, say that they don’t know how to locate a podcast.
Tree Goat Media says that on the listener side, major search engines and podcast players offer limited search capabilities, leaving 54 million hours of content nearly impossible to discover. Highly active listeners, mostly from the Gen Z age group, prefer consuming focused, short-form content, with 40% even turning to TikTok instead of Google for basic search, and there is currently no distribution channel to support these highly active listeners’ preferred method of consumption.
Sherry Mills, Co-Founder & CEO of Tree Goat Media, at home in the colors and patterns that inspire her work
Podcasters, on the other hand, are struggling to find engaged listeners, with 99% of podcasts averaging fewer than 5,000 listens per episode. There is also a very high failure rate, with 80% of podcasts not making it past the first year, something known as “podfading”. Tree Goat Media has observed that there is no distribution channel, nor even any AI-backed tool, that helps podcasters grow their engagement levels without relying on their manual efforts.
To bridge this huge gap in the industry, Tree Goat Media created Marbyl, which is the world’s first short-form search engine for podcast content. Using its proprietary Viral IntelligenceTM machine learning technology, it scans podcasts to identify and capture moments carrying high-interest levels or peak viral potential. These moments, called Marbyls, last between 15 and 90 seconds on average, and 5 of the most interesting Marbyls per episode are automatically created and made available on the Marbyl App.
Listeners are able to search for topics and get presented with stored Marbyls that match their queries with a high degree of relevance. Marbyls are shareable from the platform to all major social media sites and include direct links back into full episodes, right where the Marbyls were pulled from, to increase the likelihood of subscriber conversion, something most podcasters struggle with and that most clip generators do not solve for. Both listeners and podcasters can also create their own Marbyls from any podcast episode, resulting in more searchable and shareable moments.
Tree Goat Media was founded by Michael Kakoyiannis, a serial entrepreneur and veteran of the radio and broadcasting industry, and Sherry Mills, a multimedia artist-turned-podcaster. The startup creatively applies machine learning to unleash the potential of long-form audio content by making it searchable and more accessible, as well as solving problems related to monetization.
“We recognize the positive impact of podcasts on the mental health of listeners, helping address the crisis of loneliness affecting so many people today,” Mills says. “However, we’ve noticed that major search engines like Google have tabs for text and video but not for audio. Despite podcasting being one of the fastest-growing forms of media today, particularly among younger listeners, millions of hours of emotionally supportive content are unsearchable and inaccessible to people. Through Marbyl, we have become a first mover in bridging the two sides of the market, solving podcaster and listener challenges by matching currently undiscoverable content with the listeners who want – or need – to hear it.”
