“Your audio is not an outcome, the outcome is change,” says Ben Schuman-Stoler, the Director of Content at Blinkist, a company with millions of subscribers, who, thanks to this app, can listen to short summaries of non-fiction books in only 15 minutes. Blinkist is only one of three unique companies that focus on the use of audio as a service that is worth all the money their subscribers invest into it. Want to learn more about all of them?
1,000,000 downloads per month, multiple awards. What stands behind this success? Charlotte Pudlowski, the president and co-founder of Louie Media wanted to show erotic stories, an already broadly successful field of audio content with established revenue over 1,5 billion worldwide, in a new light. The success came from appointing young inclusive authors that created stories from the queer community with an emphasis on feminism and disruption of patriarchy. This fresh talent combined with unexplored areas of unrepresented groups of society help to change the formerly male-gazed industry.
Cecilia Gabizon, the vice president of ETX Studio offered another interesting point of view on the topic of this session. ETX is a media group with a podcast platform that is developing innovative solutions as well as the AI generated voices. She claims that in two years, synthetic voices will be almost everywhere. Her company offers a service that will transform any text to speech of various media in an efficient way. She tested the audience whether they could distinguish between human voice and AI generated one. It turned out that half of the people could not tell which voice was human and which was the AI voice. Her company is also developing tools for cars and audio in cars. In this area, the most important thing according to her is the contextualization and offer of the right content.
Ben Schuman-Stoler from Blinkist shed some light on keeping customers hooked to your content. The fundamental part isn’t making the highest quality content, it’s about knowing what your customers want. “Subscription model works on retention,” as Schuman-Stoler points out. The customer has to see the worth of their money. The content needs to be diverse, people have to engage at all times. He sees the main goal of his work in giving people the opportunity of lifelong learning; to transform with the help of Blinkist content.
