Spending tens of thousands of hours listening to podcasts, they treat podcasts as "electronic pickles"

Explore the depth and breadth of the podcast world, and uncover the lives of super listeners who regard podcasts as "electronic pickles". The article takes you into a group of senior users who spend tens of thousands of hours listening to podcasts, and experience their love and dependence on podcasts, and how podcasts have become an indispensable part of their lives.

In the field of Chinese podcasts, someone with 10,000 hours of listening time can definitely be considered an experienced user. After all, the time available for immersive listening to podcasts is limited.

Taking Xiaozhou, the leading Chinese podcast platform in China, as an example, the latest data obtained by the Xinbang editorial department shows that Xiaozhou currently has a total of more than 100,000 programs and 2.5 million daily active users, of which 0.01% of the users have listened for more than 10,000 hours, or only about 250 people.

We even saw a podcast listener with over 20,000 hours of listening time (it is not ruled out that the number may be even higher). In other words, even if one listened to podcasts 24 hours a day, it would take two years. Little Universe has only been established for four and a half years, so this listener is literally listening to podcasts with his life.

For audio content, listening time is a very important data indicator. The latest data shows that the cumulative listening time of Xiaoyuzhou has exceeded 1.1 billion hours, and the average daily listening time per person is 78 minutes.

Considering the listening scenarios of podcasts, it can be said that these are basically data results obtained by spending real personal time.

So, how do those users who spend a lot of time listening to programs view podcasts, and what stories are there behind this? Recently, the editorial department of Xinbang found three podcast listeners with more than 10,000 listening hours, and wanted to take a look at the current podcast ecosystem from their perspective and why they can spend so much time listening to podcasts.

1. Listen to podcasts at double the speed every day and listen to 10,000 episodes in a year

If you often hang out in the comment section of Xiaoyuzhou, you may be familiar with the online name "七梦".

Due to his frequent appearance in the comment sections of various podcast programs, Qi Qi Meng can be regarded as a celebrity listener in the podcast circle, just like Zhou Hetai, an internet celebrity in the comment section of WeChat public accounts in the early years.

When the podcast of the Xinbang editorial department was still being updated in the past two years, we also received suggestions on sound quality from Teacher Qi in the comment section (I would like to thank Teacher Qi here, although we have been discontinued for some time).

His Xiaoyuzhou has been listened to for 16,786 hours, and many listeners will respectfully call him "Teacher Qi". Last year, when Qiqimeng celebrated his birthday, many top anchors on Xiaoyuzhou, such as Liu Yang Jiaozhu, Shi Laoban, and Fan Yiru, sent him birthday wishes in the comment section of Qiqimeng's podcast.

So who is Qi Shi Meng and why is he so active in the podcast circle? Some people even suspect that he is a staff member of Xiao Yuzhou and listening to podcasts is his job.

In fact, although listening to podcasts is not Qi Meng’s job, he will - use his working time to listen to podcasts.

Qiqimeng told us that he was engaged in quality inspection-related work in Xiamen, and the inspection only required visual inspection, so he listened to podcasts while working every day. Remember, you can't wear headphones in both ears, otherwise it will be troublesome if you can't hear the leader's words, so he would wear headphones in one ear and change to the other one when the battery of this earphone runs out.

We asked him, "Listening to podcasts during work hours, do you think you are multitasking?" Qi Qi Meng replied calmly, "No, I am not serious about my work."

Podcasts have become an important part of Qi Meng's life. He conservatively estimates that he consumes more than 8 hours of audio programs every day when he is awake. When he goes to bed, his Xiao Yuzhou podcast is still playing. He falls asleep with the podcast, and opens his favorite podcast as soon as he wakes up in the morning.

As early as 2013, Qi Qi Meng started listening to podcasts using the software that comes with the IOS system. After that, he listened to podcasts on multiple platforms such as NetEase Cloud Music and Himalaya, until Xiao Yuzhou was born in 2020.

In February 2020, Qi Qi Meng was invited to participate in the internal testing of the Xiao Yuzhou APP, and he became the 41st user of Xiao Yuzhou. Qi Qi Meng felt that he had finally found a platform dedicated to Chinese podcasts. He began to actively participate in the comment section of major podcast programs, and thus became well-known by major anchors.

How hard does Qiqi Meng work when it comes to commenting on programs? In 2021, Qiqi Meng's annual summary of his small universe showed that the number of words in his comments reached 201,000, which is equivalent to the number of words in 1.5 copies of "To Live".

Usually, Qi Shimeng not only gives suggestions to the podcast program (he emphasized that he must use "suggestions" rather than "opinions"), but also gives suggestions to the staff of Xiao Yuzhou, such as suggesting that they improve some bugs. His level of enthusiasm is like that of "Xiao Yuzhou's fugitive employee."

"Xiao Yuzhou also has priorities. For example, the speed function has not been improved yet. Xiao Yuzhou's speed has directly transitioned from 1.7 to 2.0. 1.8 and 1.9 are gone in the middle. After 2.0, it will be 3.0, but who can hear 3.0?" Qi Qi Meng wrote "Refine the speed" on Xiao Yuzhou's homepage to urge the platform to update.

Qiqimeng said that he is a fan of speed-up. He has been exploring the speed-up function since he came into contact with audio and video. In 2016, when many video platforms had not yet launched the speed-up function, Qiqimeng posted a video on Bilibili demonstrating how to play videos at speed-up.

When listening to podcasts, Qimeng usually uses 1.7x speed. In the opinion of some users, listening to podcasts is mainly for relaxation and companionship, and they rarely use the speed. Qimeng has a different view.

“I have 300 programs in my playlist, each of which is more than an hour long. If I don’t use double speed, I will miss a lot of good programs.

Qi Qi Meng is an omnivorous podcast lover. He has subscribed to more than 2,000 programs on Xiao Yuzhou. Given the weekly frequency of the programs, he really can’t finish listening to them without turning on the speed.

Double speed has become Qi Qi Meng's killer feature for listening to podcasts. With this function, Qi Qi Meng listened to 10,515 episodes in 2023, which is equivalent to listening to 28.8 podcasts a day.

In Qi Shi Meng's opinion, speaking at double the speed can improve the efficiency of receiving information. Being immersed in a program at double the speed will put one into a flow state and one will not feel that the host speaks too fast.

When I asked him if he felt that comedy podcasts like "No Kidding" were too fast when the talk show hosts used a lot of language and jokes, he replied: No, it actually made me laugh even more.

After using the speed function, Qiqimeng has become more tolerant of podcasts. Even if he hears a program he is not interested in, he can speed up to finish listening. Because of this, he is very tolerant of the ads inserted in the podcasts: "With the speed function, they go by very quickly."

Among the top 10 podcast programs that Qi Qi Meng listened to the longest, three were podcasts recorded by talk show hosts. He would also go offline to watch the hosts perform talk shows, but he felt that he was used to listening to podcasts at double speed, and it would be very tiring to listen to them at the original speed offline.

When I told him that I had been listening to podcasts at original speed, Qiqimeng strongly recommended that I use double speed: "You can try it first, starting with 1.1x speed and taking the first step. You can't just limit yourself to a few podcasts, right? There are still many programs you haven't discovered yet."

Qiqimeng has an obsessive-compulsive obsession with listening to podcasts. After Xiaoyuzhou was launched, many podcast hosts re-uploaded their past podcasts to Xiaoyuzhou. Qiqimeng had already listened to these programs, but he wanted to leave a listening record on Xiaoyuzhou. In this way, Qiqimeng had to listen to these programs again.

"For example, Sugar Garlic Radio has been updated since 2013, with a total of more than 3,000 episodes, which is impossible to listen to." Qiqimeng was very distressed that he could not mark all the programs he had listened to on Xiaoyuzhou. He reported the problem to Xiaoyuzhou, hoping to develop a function that allows users to mark the programs they have listened to with one click without spending time listening to them again, but the platform has not yet adopted it considering that there may be data anomalies in the background.

Speaking of this, I have to mention that where seven dreams appear, you can also see a listener with the ID "Eight Dreams".

The origin of Eight Dreams began with the desire to "compete with Seven Dreams for the commenting seat". "When I first used Xiaoyuzhou, when I refreshed the page on time every morning, there was always someone named 'Seven Dreams' who commented on the comment section of my favorite podcast before me. I became competitive and changed the name to 'Eight Dreams'," Eight Dreams recalled.

In the process of catching up with Qiximeng, Ba Meng also became a heavy podcast user. His Xiao Universe has listened to more than 15,000 hours, and he still needs 1,508 hours or 62 days to catch up with Qiximeng. He often appears in the comment section, and is on par with Qiximeng. Since Ba Meng is one year older than Qiximeng, when he meets Qiximeng in the comment section, he will "affectionately" call him "cousin."

Later, Nine Dreams and Ten Dreams appeared on the platform, like the N dream universe of the podcast review world.

Like Qi Meng, Ba Meng also listens to podcasts during work hours. Ba Meng is a master in a private enterprise in Zhejiang. He is responsible for processing orders in the factory on a daily basis. Except for lunch and lunch break, he listens to podcasts. It can be said that Ba Meng's podcast listening time is equal to or greater than his working time.

Ba Meng said that he could feel some problems with his ears after wearing headphones for a long time, and he guessed that he might have serious hearing problems when he was old. But there was nothing he could do, Ba Meng loved podcasts so much that he still listened to them with headphones during work hours. He joked that podcasts had become his spiritual opium, "I feel uncomfortable if I don't listen to them for a day."

As the leading listeners in terms of listening time, Seven Dreams and Eight Dreams have both spent money on podcasts.

For example, they have all bought paid programs for humorous chats. They have also paid for ads in podcasts. For example, Qiqimeng said, "Da Feixin has a lot of ads in podcasts. I didn't believe it at first. Can it really save my hair? Then I bought it when Mao Dong recommended it, and you know what, it worked a little bit."

2. He prefers the "Northern School" podcast. He listened to "Harmonious Chat" 5 times.

Of course, there are very few listeners like Qi Qi Meng and Ba Ba Meng who are well-known in the podcast circle. Most listeners just listen quietly, such as Lao Jia (pseudonym).

Lao Jia told the editorial department of Xinbang that he started listening to podcasts on Himalaya in 2019, and the listening time on Himalaya alone reached 12,410 hours. After Xiaoyuzhou went online, he began to switch to Xiaoyuzhou to listen to podcasts, and the listening time has reached 11,365 hours.

"Listening to podcasts gives me a sense of escapism. There are already too many ups and downs in life, so I just want to have a relatively simple little world. At least the people in the podcasts are familiar to me, and I can immerse myself in them.

"Lao Jia is a 1975s living in Beijing. As he enters middle age, he feels that his lifestyle and that of the people around him have become fixed. Podcasts have become a way for him to explore new things. The key is that listening to podcasts does not hurt the eyes.

In addition to working and spending time with his children, he uses all his time to listen to podcasts. Especially when he encounters a program he likes, he will listen to it repeatedly. For example, he listened to the entire program of "Comedian Chat Club" 5 times.

When he first came into contact with podcasts, Lao Jia liked to listen to the hosts talk about their unique life experiences. After listening, he felt like he was living his life again from someone else's perspective. He observed that such podcasts often appeared on the editor's selection interface of Xiaoyuzhou.

However, after listening to too many podcasts that tell the hosts' personal stories, Jia feels that they are becoming too homogeneous. "When I listen to the stories of 100 people, I feel that their experiences are very vivid, but when I listen to the stories of 1,000 people, I find that everyone's experiences are similar.

"Since then, Lao Jia has rarely paid attention to the podcasts that appear in the editor's selection, and instead searches for topics that interest him and looks for new podcasts.

Some time ago, he was very interested in "Black Myth: Wukong". After searching on Xiaoyuzhou, he found thirty or forty programs talking about "Black Myth: Wukong". After listening to all of them, he followed 10 new programs.

Through this search, the number of Lao Jia’s subscribed podcasts increased from 100 to 260.

When talking about his preference for listening to podcasts, Lao Jia said that he has a special liking for "Northern-style" podcasts.

In recent years, the podcast industry has also been divided into the north and the south. Specifically, the hosts of the "northern school" of podcasts generally live in northern cities, mainly Beijing, and the content is more down-to-earth, such as "Daily Talk in the Park", while the "southern school" is also called the "Shanghai school" of podcasts, where the hosts live mainly in Shanghai, and the content tends to be cultural conversations with an elitist atmosphere, such as "Left and Right".

After listening to podcasts for several years, Lao Jia no longer likes information-intensive cultural conversations. He is more attracted to the relaxed atmosphere exuding from the conversations between the hosts, especially the podcasts recorded by people from Beijing and Tianjin.

In May this year, "Super Game Culture", a podcast that Lao Jia often listens to, in which Beijingers talk about games, launched a four-hour podcast program. Lao Jia listened to it twice in one day. "I was happy and fascinated to listen to the chat among the brothers."

As a fellow Beijinger, Lao Jia and the anchors developed a sense of mutual appreciation. He felt that Beijingers all loved to have fun and were pure idealists at heart. He could feel the sincerity and passion of these anchors in making podcasts. Therefore, when the anchors launched paid services, he was very willing to spend money for them.

When Xieliao launched a paid program priced at 99 yuan, Lao Jia placed an order without hesitation. In his opinion, the quality and theme of the program are not important. Since he has listened to many podcasts of Xieliao for free, he is willing to place an order no matter how much money they offer when they launch a paid program.

In May this year, Super Game Culture launched a board game called "Five Generations Chronicles", which required crowdfunding from listeners. The production could only be arranged if the crowdfunding amount exceeded 10,000 yuan. When Lao Jia learned about it, he immediately placed an order for 4 boxes of the board game, which was priced at 149 yuan.

When it comes to supporting anchors, Lao Jia is quite emotional. He said: "There are some things that I may not be able to achieve in my lifetime, but some people can achieve them, so I want to support them.

"After Xiao Yuzhou had listened to podcasts for more than 10,000 hours, Jia also developed aesthetic fatigue with podcasts. He admitted that sometimes when he looked at the full playlist, he had no urge to click on it and listen.

There are also many old faces on the homepage recommendation list. In Jia's opinion, "the top podcasts dominate the market, but it is difficult for them to come up with new content, and new podcasts have few opportunities to be heard." Therefore, he suggested that Xiaozhou could organize top anchors and small anchors to record cross-channel programs together, similar to the old leading the new. However, this proposal may be difficult to achieve in practice.

When talking about podcasts, Lao Jia always talks endlessly. He also posts his thoughts on podcasts and recommendations for some good programs on Xiaohongshu. Although only a few people follow him, he enjoys it.

In Lao Jia's life, there is no one who loves to listen to podcasts. His state is very similar to the sentence on his Xiao Yu Universe homepage: "Traveler is destined - perhaps forever - to roam the Milky Way."

3. Conclusion

In conversations with these veteran podcast listeners, we noticed that even if Jia and others may feel aesthetic fatigue with podcasts, it is only temporary. It is no more than the difference between listening to podcasts for 7 hours and 8 hours a day.

What’s important is that for super listeners like them, listening to podcasts has become a lifestyle habit, as common as eating and sleeping.

Extra-long listening time also means stronger user stickiness.

Not long ago, Xiaozhou held the largest offline event since its establishment, "Xiaozhou Podcast Wandering Day". Although it was raining in Shanghai that day, the audience flow on site still reached more than 20,000, including many users who listened for over 100 or 1,000 hours.

There was a note wall at the event to record the "listening scene". For many people, the time they spend listening to podcasts is their most precious time alone. So the fans of podcasts may be the most talkative fans, because they have invested their time and sincerity.

It is also because of the privacy of this listening scene that the relationship between podcast hosts and listeners has an extra layer of intimacy, and podcasts have become a spiritual paradise that they build together with sound.

In the future, when podcasts become more popular among the general public and listening time exceeds 10,000 hours, it will no longer be uncommon. At that time, there should be more old-fashioned podcasts that are listened to repeatedly and become the "life programs" of some people.

Author | Xiaoya Editor | Zhang Jie