What Are Podcasting 2.0 Transcripts and What Are The Benefits?
Making transcripts available for your podcast helps you reach a wider audience while giving your listeners more ways to consume your content.
With over 4 million podcasts for listeners to choose from, how are you going to get your podcast to stand out? How are you going to reach the widest audience possible?
Transcripts are no silver bullet, but they certainly make your podcast easier to discover, search, share and repurpose in different content formats.
What are podcast transcripts?
A podcast transcript is a text version of your podcast that allows listeners to read along word-by-word. Thanks to AI, you no longer have to spend a lot of time typing them out yourself or spend a lot of money hiring a professional transcription company to do it for you.
While Spotify and Apple Podcasts don't yet support the transcripts tag, many podcast apps do - including Fountain. So if you or your podcast host supports the <podcast:transcript> tag, your own transcripts will appear within Fountain. Some podcast hosts who support transcripts include RSS.com and Buzzsprout.
Thanks to our partnership with Deepgram, Fountain is now able to offer high-quality transcripts to podcasters and listeners in the app and on our web pages - more on this below.
Why are podcast transcripts useful?
Podcast transcripts come with a number of benefits. For podcasters, they allow your content to exist in different channels and mediums. For listeners, it gives them different ways to consume your content and makes it easier to find. Here’s why you should provide transcripts for your podcast - and how to get the most out of them.
Easier to Listen
Not all of us have perfect hearing. Not all of us speak English as our first language, or find it easy to understand people with strong accents, whether they're from Scotland or New Zealand. Transcripts can help your podcast reach new audiences that have difficulty listening to your show.
Transcripts also let listeners consume your podcast in different situations where headphones or speakers might not be appropriate. Adding a good transcript can help make your podcast, and the ideas within it, more accessible to more people.
Easier to Discover
The SEO benefits of transcripts are significant for podcasters. Without a transcript, search engines will only be able to index the text in your episode title and show notes, so your podcast has a smaller chance of being found online.
For podcasters who have a website or blog, it is recommended that they add transcripts for every new episode. The more valuable content you have on channels, the more you can enhance your position as the authority in your subject area - and the more likely you are to appear in related searches.
Easier to Search
The average podcast length is 38 minutes, but some are as long as 5 hours. If your podcast has long episodes that feature a broad range of different subjects, giving listeners a way to go to specific point in that episode is incredibly useful for them.
One way to do this is to provide chapters (you can add these via your hosting platform and they will appear in Fountain). However making a transcript available gives listeners even more control as they can search for specific terms and play from that point in the episode on Fountain.
Easier to Share
If you make transcripts available, your audience now has multiple ways to share the content via social media or their personal blog. Listeners can already create clips of your podcast on Fountain and share them as videos, but providing a transcript means that the highlights can also be shared as text.
Transcripts also make it easier for publications and writers to cover the content of a particular episodes in an article by accurately citing direct quotes from you and your guests. This is beneficial for reaching new audiences with your podcast and attracting listeners.
Easier to Repurpose
Podcasters don’t just make podcasts. The most successful ones are actively growing and engaging new audiences across multiple channels, including social media, website, blogs and newsletters.
Although millions of people listen to podcasts, others don’t listen at all. This means you can reach an entirely new audience of people who don’t consume podcasts the traditional way.
Having transcripts of your latest episodes is incredibly useful if you repurpose key conversations or ideas contained in your podcast as short-form posts or long-form articles to promote your podcast.
How do podcast transcripts work in Fountain?
On Fountain, we've gone one better. If a podcaster hasn't added transcripts already, we will provide them for you. You can also search transcripts and find a specific point to start playing from - and you can access them offline. Just tap the transcript button on the player or go to the transcript tab on any episode page. Here’s how it works:
Fountain Premium Users: Get unlimited transcripts on demand for any podcast with Fountain Premium for just £2.99 a month.
All Other Users: Pay a fee of $0.50 (around 2000 sats) for every hour of audio transcription. If a transcript has already been made available by the podcaster or by another user, listeners will get it for free.
Podcasters: Get audio transcripts of all new episodes and make them available to your listeners for free if you have claimed your show on Fountain. If your podcast includes SRT, X-SUBRIP or JSON transcripts in your RSS feed, they will already be available in Fountain.
Thanks to our partnership with Deepgram, transcripts on Fountain are:
Fast: Transcripts for an hour long episode are generated in under 30 seconds
Accurate: Detect languages, differentiate between speakers and accurately translate speech to text regardless of audio quality.
Cheap: Transcribe an hour-long episode for just $0.50 or get unlimited transcripts on demand with Fountain Premium.
The case for micropayments for on-demand services
As more AI services become available, if we want to create products that users can interact with on-demand, we can’t rely on fiat payment rails if we want to make them accessible at the lowest possible cost to the end user.
The magic of micropayments (over the Bitcoin Lightning Network, in Fountain’s case) is that the transaction fees applied by payment providers like Apple Pay and Google Pay are avoided. This means these high quality services are much cheaper than they would otherwise be.
To learn more about how transcripts work on Fountain, read the full guide in our FAQs.