🪵 We're listening

We’re listening

Nielsen reported Americans spend almost 20% of their day listening to stuff, 67% of which is ad-supported. The illustration above shows the segmentation of 18+ year-olds across audio platforms.

While radio has a somewhat surprisingly strong foothold, this data isn’t completely out of left field. We recently reported on Spotify doubling down on educational and podcast content. As a reminder:

• In 2013, about 12% of US consumers listened to podcasts. In 2023, this number reached 41%.

• In 2023, there were over 2 million podcasts and 48 million episodes out in the world.

• In 2018, advertising revenue from podcasts sat around $479 million (US market). In 2023, that number exceeded $2 billion.

And product teams are paying attention.

For example, Beehiiv, the newsletter company, launched Audio Newsletters hoping to capitalise on this growing trend.

Or Wondercraft, a suite of audio editing tools to create studio-quality podcasts, audio ads, and more from the comfort of your laptop.

And, of course, products like ElevenLabs cover the AI-powered audio creation side of the equation with voice generators and AI-enhanced text-to-speech.

It’s clear this is only the beginning for audio, as more and more businesses find untapped opportunities in this underutilised channel.

Yelp’s product roadmap

It’s not every day we get to hear directly from a CPO, so let’s lean in.

Yelp’s Craig Saldanh gave TechCrunch an interview to discuss the future of the product, the AI opportunities, and how Yelp plans to compete against the TikToks of the world.

Here are some highlights:

• Yelp leverage its unique data set: 200m+ written reviews. Perfect to feed the hungry LLMs, allowing users to search for the perfect service, experience, or product more efficiently. This is a similar value-add to Productboard’s Insights with AI search.

• Yelp try to catch nascent businesses with new products like Smart Budgets. This tool helps new businesses make sense of their place in the market, figure out pricing, and more; all based on data collected from similar businesses in their location.

• Yelp are facing unlikely competitors in TikTok (where ~2 billion searches happen every day). Craig believes Yelp’s extensive content, reviews, and breadth of businesses is their key competitor advantage here.

Overall, Yelp’s product mission remains the same:

Yelp has been on a positive trajectory over the past 4 years, printing the following revenue numbers:

From the woodshed

• OpenAI won’t snitch on you. Talks of watermarking ChatGPT answers were quickly abandoned as users expressed they feared ‘getting caught’. Caught doing what? Writing newsletters using ChatGPT? We would never.

• According to Atlassian, product people spend ~31 hours per month on calls. Clarity could be a huge time-saver for us all with features like automating product feedback, discovery questions, and more.

• Snapchat+ now boasts over 11 million subscribers. At ~$3.99/mo, this “enhanced and customisable” version of the app now rakes in almost $44 million MRR for the social media giant.

• Twitter has disappeared from the Apple App Store.

Get backlog’d

When product host ‘customer feedback’ sessions

Written by: Product nerds. What did you expect?

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Did you want to forward this email? That would be amazing. Do it. Now.