Everyone and their mother wants in on podcasts, and that contingent now includes Twitter.
The platform’s been trying to make audio happen for more than a year now. Its latest effort to get users invested in Spaces, its Clubhouse copycat, is by redesigning the Spaces tab to rope in podcasts.
“Our internal research indicates that 45% of people who use Twitter in the US also listen to podcasts monthly, so we’ll automatically suggest compelling podcasts to help people easily find and listen to the topics they want to hear more about,” Twitter said in a company blog post.
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The Spaces redesign “introduces personalized hubs that group audio content together by specific themes like News, Music, Sports, and more,” it added. Those hubs will offer both currently live Spaces and recordings of previous Spaces.
And, of course, alongside these Spaces will be podcasts in the same genres. Twitter says the hubs will feature “the most popular and engaging podcasts from around the world,” but didn’t specify exactly which podcasts it means or how it’s planning to coax those shows onto its platform when competitors like Spotify and YouTube have been shelling out hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars to secure exclusivity on major series.
Twitter did hype Vox Media’s slate of shows, which appear to be in the launch library for the Spaces redesign.
Twitter says users’ individual Spaces hubs will be customized based on what Twitter already knows about their preferences, and will also adjust depending on how users react to suggested podcasts. (“Want to build a more customized experience?” Twitter asks. “Just give a podcast a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ to let us know if the content is more or less interesting to you.”)
The Spaces redesign and Twitter’s first stab at podcasts are now available to “a group of global English-speaking audience on iOS and Android,” Twitter says, with more announcements planned for the future.
