Designed to expand the navigation, search and discovery of podcast episodes across multiple platforms, Nielsen’s new service Gracenote Audio On Demand can standardize how listeners find and consume podcasts.
Launched with standardized podcast titles, descriptions and imagery across more than 900,000 podcast series, Gracenote Audio On Demand assigns each series a “popularity score” to help identify the most popular content. Series will also be indexed by a category hierarchy, with three levels of categories to classify series and episodes, and will include “celebrity links” that allow listeners to identify verified “celebrity” content.
[Read “Top 25 Podcasts People Actually Listen to in 2020”]
Using descriptive data and unique content identifiers in Gracenote Audio On Demand, podcast and talk radio listeners can connect to a broader range of personalities and topics with the service.
The concept, explained Greg Gentschev, SVP of product management, Gracenote music and auto at Nielsen, in a press release, was to apply the same “methodology and approach to podcasts that currently underpins [Gracenote’s]… search and discovery of todays TV shows, movies and music” to podcasts.
Features of Gracenote Audio On Demand include: deduplicated and normalized data, with daily checks remove duplicate submissions and eliminate encoding issues; in-depth categorization, with standardized classifiers for series and episodes; standard IDs, with a common Gracenote ID for a podcast series across different platforms; a “parties and celebrities” feature that allows users to identify verified celebrity links; and an API, SDK and full feed access.
According to Nielsen Scarborough, the audience for podcasting has been growing by 20% on average for the last six years.
