Specialization has benefits, for consumers and business. Stitcher, a listening app dedicated to podcasts and talk radio shows, announced that its mobile app has been downloaded over 12-million times, and its catalog now contains over 20,000 shows.
Other platforms include a focus on talk, including TuneIn, iHeartRadio (which has been building up its Talk section recently) and Apple’s podcast app for iOS. Stitcher’s dedication to the category is paying off in usage metrics, and also provides a more refined in-app experience for anyone for whom talk is as important as music (or more important).
The Stitcher app encourages music-style customization — favoriting, playlisting, sharing, and a back-end intelligence that learns the user’s taste over time. The result is a high level of discovery in the talk realm, and a rewarding level of control.
Stitcher’s press release quotes an executive at Libsyn, an unaffiliated podcast hosting platform: ““From our metrics, Stitcher appears to be the largest platform for listening on Android and second largest on iOS behind only Apple.” On the revenue side, Stitcher’s ad earnings have grown 75 percent year-over-year.