About Y Pod
Y Pod is a minority language podcast service that gathers all Welsh language podcasts in one place. It improves podcast discoverability and provides users with a single place to listen to all Welsh language podcasts.
Y Pod started because I couldn’t find the things I wanted to listen to
As a first language Welsh speaker with a love for podcasts and audio journalism, I felt frustrated by how difficult it was to find Welsh language podcasts. On the big podcast players, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify, there are over two million podcasts, but you can't filter by language, and you’ll struggle to find anything beyond the eight or nine supported languages.
I wanted to find suitable podcasts that existed outside of these heavyweight platforms
I looked into how many Welsh language podcasts existed and listed them all in one place, just for me to see what was out there. It involved a lot of searching on Twitter, Facebook and Google. There were 38 Welsh language podcasts at the time (2018). With this data and awareness, I set up a social media account in 2019 for Y Pod. Essentially, it was an account that shared links to Welsh language podcasts, so that people like me could find all the Welsh language podcasts in one place and find links out to them.
Y Pod helped the number of Welsh language podcasts almost double in 2019
By promoting what existed, Welsh language podcasts were getting more listeners. The community was better supported, which, I believe, encouraged more people to produce Welsh language podcasts. This all showed me the potential of Y Pod.
I approached Clwstwr for funding to develop Y Pod into a listener hub
I received £31,500 funding from Clwstwr to put towards the project, which enabled me to focus and develop Y Pod. I wanted to enhance user experiences of Y Pod; my idea was not only to promote and share links to the podcasts, but to also give people a really good listener experience once they'd found out about a podcast via Y Pod. I wanted to create a hub where you could listen to all of the Welsh language podcasts in one place. And, if it worked, it could become a model that could be rolled out in other languages.
I had a lot of data around user numbers and bounce rates (users were landing on Y Pod then going off elsewhere to listen, which was fine as that was the initial intention). I wanted to keep these users within the Y Pod infrastructure, so they could have a really good listening experience. Additionally, I was conscious of having an income source to keep Y Pod economically sustainable, so adding a listening function to retain users could provide more potential for this to happen.
I started my Clwstwr project by seeing what was already in existence
There were a few slightly similar things out there, in terms of projects that grouped podcasts of a certain type. For example, there was a project in Minnesota that had pulled together all of the podcasts based in Minnesota. I also looked at what existed in other languages. It turned out that there wasn't anything; there was a gap for Y Pod to fill.
I then looked into features of the main podcast players and apps that could benefit Y Pod, so that we could give people a similar experience. Beyond this, I researched who I could work with to evolve Y Pod, how we might develop it into a model that makes podcasts on a theme more discoverable.
The research, innovation and build stages were closely knit
To add to my knowledge of coding, I brought in a software engineer to help me with the innovation and build, based on my research. I came from a background of having to work to tight briefs and deadlines, so when my Clwstwr team told me to simply try things and see what works, it felt completely new to me!
We tried lots of things iteratively, taking little steps and regularly rolling out small builds. This allowed us to see how people were getting on with each small thing we’d built, as opposed to building the entire thing without testing it on route.
We considered the back end and front end of Y Pod at the same time
I knew that we had to build something really simple that, at the back end, allowed a podcast database to be searched and put into categories, so that Y Pod could potentially be rolled out to other languages. I also wanted the interface to be easy to use, to make it enjoyable for users.
We built Y Pod off one database, populated with Welsh language podcasts. This gave us the flexibility to be able to use the software for similar things in the future; for example, to build a hub for podcasts in another language or on a specific topic, it’d just be a case of populating the database with those kinds of podcasts.
For this Welsh language version of Y Pod, we split the podcasts into six categories (entertainment and music, sport, religion, current affairs, children's and factual shows). Over the course of the project, we realised that the number of Welsh learners coming to the service looking for podcasts to improve their Welsh was really big, so we added a filter that highlights podcasts suitable for Welsh learners.
Following conversations with app developers, we built Y Pod as a trusted web app
It's predominantly a website that is styled for smartphones, because that's where most people listen, but it can actually be installed on smartphones as an app. I did lots of user testing during this innovation and build stage, just to get feedback on how people were using the service, what they thought of it, whether they felt they were able to discover podcasts, and so on.
As we developed Y Pod, the number of Welsh language podcasts increased
We found that people were coming to us to ask if they could be added to Y Pod, which was amazing. It's rare now for somebody to launch a Welsh language podcast and not get in touch with us. By the end of the project, there were 140 Welsh language podcasts, a huge increase from when I started Y Pod. This project shows that we can support the Welsh language podcast scene by having a promotional platform for people to discover the podcasts and to listen to them, all in one place.
We’re really excited to see what Y Pod can become
The pandemic slowed our intentions for the roll out of Y Pod in other languages, but I’ve had promising initial discussions with other organisations about doing it for different languages. That would be a really nice thing to do – to get another language involved, develop something around that language and see whether they can have the same impact in that particular language. Once industry conferences and expos start back, I can go to them and showcase Y Pod in front of people, which should be really good too.
There are different opportunities to make money from Y Pod. We have adverts now, which is good progress. The main thing for me, on the commercialisation element, would be to talk to other languages, and then get some sort of franchise model in place. I'd own the code and host the service, but someone who's a native in that language would run the service. I can’t wait to see where we go next.