Is Medium Eying Up Podcasting?

I would be doing my friends at Medium, who have made me rich beyond my wildest dreams (just kidding!), dirty, if I didn’t do a quick blog talking about the fact that they’ve entered the audio space. This week they announced the acquisition of Knowable, a discrete service that provides ‘audio lessons’, a product that falls somewhere between audiobooks and podcasts (but with a greater effective similarity to the latter, I suspect).

Audio-first learning is big business. We’re all used to the endless adverts across podcasts for services like Blinkist and Wondrium (the artist formerly known as the Great Courses Plus) and in Podcast Content Land, history and science communication has exploded over the last year. If I were starting again from scratch in the world of audio, I think that education communication might be the route I’d go — it’s certainly much simpler and more direct from a content creation and marketing perspective than, say, news or politics or sports or comedy.

The ethos of Medium, as far as I can tell from my interactions with it predominantly as a writer, has always been rather like the ethos that underlay the foundations of podcasting. It is, essentially, a masthead, a UX, that professionalises the act of independent creation — just as the basic tech of the podcast corrected for the limitations of independent distribution. Both are governed by a desire…