Podcast Guide: The New Community Search Engine For Podcasts

 Since 1954 through the rest of the century, TV Guide magazine made it easy for viewers to find the shows they wanted to watch. For movies, the newspaper offered convenient movie times and locations for decades until the internet and ultimately phone apps assumed that valuable role.

In effect, finding a TV program, broadcast or streaming, and a movie you wanted to see in a theater has not been a massive undertaking that consumes mental bandwidth or physical exertion.

Now, finding a podcast or a topic layered inside a podcast episode is five times worse than finding "Waldo," ten times worse than locating Carmen San Diego and 50 times harder than finding where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. 

Why? Because there are tens of thousands of podcasts. The good news for listeners? There are also thousands of good podcasts that deserve your ear time. The bad news for listeners? Finding those thousands of podcasts is like looking for a contact lens that fell out on the dance floor.

To increase the degree of difficulty, let's suppose you wanted to search a specific topic across thousands of podcasts? Moses's 40-year trek in the desert would not be enough time to complete that search.

Well, leave it to the podcast community to engineer solutions.

The one I want to discuss today is called Podcast Guide. 

 Podcast Guide's stated mission is to "bring podcasts and listeners together. It's more than a listing service. It's a search engine for podcasts. It's a community that helps listeners discover new podcasts, helps creators build a stronger audience and generate revenue, and helps advertisers tap into the powerful podcast marketplace."

 Podcast Guide is a free service designed to help listeners find the podcasts that cover the topics that mean the most to them. They call it "episode-first" because Podcast Guide helps users get right into the episodes that new podcasts are producing.

• Search podcasts and episodes to find new voices.
• Quickly see what new episodes have been released.
• Browse categories that appeal to you.
• Easily see what new episodes are available.
• Rate and comment on podcasts and see what other people have said.

You can even follow podcasts, and a special page shows enables listeners to have a one-stop spot to listen to new episodes from the podcasts you follow. 

For podcasters, Podcast Guide can be a resource specifically designed to help your podcast connect with new listeners and generate revenue. You can list your podcast for free on Podcast Guide and be part of the discovery engine that's changing the way people find podcasts.

Podcast Guide also offers a paid Premiere Podcasts service, which appears at or near the top of relevant search and category results, as well as in relevant "Other Podcasts to consider" sections. Podcasters can receive host-read ad offers for their podcast -- offers that follow parameters they set. Podcasters can then accept, reject, or make a counter-offer. Podcast Guide claims to take care of all the logistics. 

 Check out Podcast Guide here.