Netflix Has Trapped Pete Davidson In His Garage

People who think about the podcast business love to say that podcasts have a “discoverability problem,” and that the recent pivot to video is an attempt to solve it. The discoverability problem is that the medium still hasn’t figured out a reliable, easily reproducible way to capture and hold a listener’s attention. It’s easier to stumble upon video curated and served via algorithm than it is to click several buttons in a dedicated app in order to listen to a piece of audio. In its attempt to gain a hold on YouTube’s domination of the internet’s passive viewing population, Netflix rolled out podcasts earlier this year with licensing deals with Spotify, Barstool Sports, and iHeart, but if discoverability is any part of Netflix’s objective, it has failed abjectly with its new video podcasts, which were quietly launched at the end of January. First of all, it’s nearly impossible to stumble upon podcasts on Netflix unless you know what you’re looking for. There’s no homepage carousel, no link in the home navigation, not even a category in the show genres dropdown menu. I clicked around the homepage for several minutes looking for a podcasts homepage before finally giving up and typing “podcast” in the search bar. This search yielded something that approximated what I was hoping for: a page of every show on the platform presumably tagged with the word “podcast,” arranged in no coherent order.