The Pit and Pod is the weekly blog of the Archaeology Podcast Network full of updates, news and opinion. Written by co-founder Tristan Boyle and special guest writers

Following on my previous blog post on feeling like no one is listening, I want to discuss the importance of getting on with fellow content creators and other people in order to help each other out.

It is no secret that if you are creating content, it can sometimes feel that you are competing with other people for the time of your possible shared audience, this can be even more prominent if you are in a niche topic area, like archaeology.

I think this is a false economy, in many ways we are so used to ideas of competition and “winning” in terms of markets; however this fails to capture the nature of a podcast listener.

In fact according to the latest statistics, the average podcast listener has around 6 shows that they listen to a lot. A person’s time is valuable but its not a space for monopoly, in fact the growth of many shows happen because someone is listening to one show and hears the guest from another. I recently received an email from a listener who had heard me as a producer on Archaeoanimals and then subsequently started listening to my show, Modern Myth because of that.

That is something special about the podcast community. These links are so easy in terms of promoting each other's work and helping each other, that podcasting is more of a web of connection than just a series of random links. I really would like to see less focus on numbers in podcasting and more on the interaction between podcasters. And the benefits speak for themselves, people are not listening to just one show, there is an appetite for more and more.

This all goes back to what is the value of a good listener? Is it someone who silently listens to your show without fail every time you release new content? Is it someone who live tweets your show without fail, but seems to skip some episodes? Is it someone in between those two? And most importantly, where are you as a content creator as far as being a content consumer?

Very few of us are recording and releasing without having our own shows and podcast communities that we are a part of? Are we doing what we would want of our own audience?

Without wishing to sound subversive or dreary, I believe that the nature of understanding podcast audiences is still in its infancy. The fact is that when I look for research into podcasting in archeology online I can find what I wrote in 2017 and have just had published last month, is all the proof I need. We need to be discussing these above questions if we are all wanting to benefit the community as a whole and that group can’t form if we aren’t interested in forming it and coalescing it into something real and responsive, instead of presumed or imagined.

Thus if you are a creator of sorts and enjoy other people’s shows, please reach out, even if just to say that you are listening and enjoy the content.

Step by step we can start building bridges and building communities of creators as well as listeners who give better insight so we might improve how we work and what we put out.

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