The Mysterious Audience-Growing Power of Transcripts

TRANSCRIPTS

A Little-Known Secret of Podcast Marketing Success that Audio Dramatists could easily be Implementing (but Rarely Do).

NB: Actually, in the twelve months since I wrote this article, the number of audio dramas providing transcripts to accompany their shows has increased dramatically – a great thing in my view.

WHY PROVIDE TRANSCRIPTS?

Back before the internet was a thing, archivists, librarians, and other information retrieval specialists regularly used transcripts to help navigate, sort, store, and retrieve content. Today transcripts fulfil the same function in the digital realm by making content more accessible, searchable, shareable, and digestible.

Transcripts make a podcast vastly more discoverable and accessible to search-engines.

Podcasts are meant to be heard and this is their great strength. Music, sound effects, and dialog, all combine to create a great auditory theatre experience. But none of these sounds are “searchable” by Google or any of the other search engines. Search engines rely on (digitally) written words. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but if we want our podcasts to be indexed and ranked by search engines then we have to provide words to accompany the link to the audio. And the most search-engine-friendly approach we can take is to post a transcript of the content online with our audio.

I would not be surprised at all to discover that part of Lauren Shippen’s success with The Bright Sessions (apart from the stellar writing and acting etc.) comes, in part, from the fact that all her episodes are accompanied by a web-page transcript that boosts the discoverability of the show in search engines such as Google.

In 2011, This American Life decided to transcribe all their episodes. This show began in 1995 so that was a major project. They then analysed the effects of adding transcripts to podcasts. Over a 27-month period they used Google Analytics to record the number of unique visitors and page views. They saw an increase of 6.28% in the number of unique visitors finding their content through online searches and gained a 3.89% increase in links back to their website and its content along with measurably higher engagement (visitors were staying on, and exploring, their site for longer periods of time).

Transcripts also provide a solid anchor for backlinks (an important factor in determining your search engine ranking).

Transcripts aren’t a particularly saleable commodity. As a script-writer, I have lamented more than once about the fact that people don’t read scripts (despite all the benefits that accrue from the practice). There’s no point putting our scripts up for sale behind a pay-wall and jealously guarding them in this way. The market we might attract by selling our scripts is worth far less to us than the boost in discoverability we can achieve by having transcripts available to search-engines on our websites.

Transcripts are amazingly useful to journalists, fans, and reviewers. The transcript is an automatic source of quotes that can be mined to fill out the promotional pieces journalists and reviewers want to write about our shows and they also provide great fodder for fan-based word of mouth… but only if the transcripts exist and can be accessed.

Transcripts provide a space to deliver extra value to your sponsors. If you include the text of your promotions and advertiser copy in the transcript as well, then you have found a way to give your advertiser extra exposure and a better return on their investment in your show.

Transcripts increase the accessibility of the podcast for disabled audience members. I’ve written before about how grateful (as a person with a hearing impairment) I am when an audio drama supplies transcripts to accompany their recordings. Deaf people aren’t, contrary to popular belief, necessarily excluded from enjoying audio drama. I am completely deaf in one ear but my other is mostly okay. Nonetheless, if the occasional word or part of a word falls into the frequency range that I can’t hear (or if the background sound-bed is a little louder than I can process), it is a huge help to have a transcript I can follow along with. Likewise, non-native speakers, people who are getting older and find it harder to follow rapid-fire conversations, and people who have auditory processing difficulties can still enjoy the production. Dark Adventure Radio Theatre have always made transcripts available with their recordings and, as a result, have kept me as a loyal repeat customer since their very first production.

I personally find it far more disability-friendly for a show to charge for the recordings and make the scripts available for free than for the show to make the recordings free and hide the scripts behind a paywall as special bonus content available to their paying supporters. While producers have every right (and a great need) to generate revenue from every stream available to them, people with disabilities can be forgiven for feeling they are inadvertently being asked to pay extra to get full access to assistive content (by which I mean material like transcripts) that will give them full access to an experience that more able-bodied people get for free. Again, I want to underline the fact that, despite this, I fully support a producers right to monetize any part of their intellectual property that they choose in any fashion they choose.

OBJECTIONS

There are some legitimate objections to be raised that we should also take into account. The protection of intellectual property is a significant issue in this day and age. By releasing transcripts to the world, we increase the chances that someone will come along and try to rip us off – producing our content or attempting to sell it. I suspect that most of us vastly overestimate the commercial interest the wider community has in scripts, but there is no doubt that, even where we carefully copyright our content, this is a risk.

It is also true that shows which have numerous writers and which license the scripts they have produced may have difficulty getting clearance to make the transcripts public. It needs to be acknowledged that not every show is going to want to, or be able to, make transcripts available. But there are also a large number of shows where the producer/writer is the same person who owns the website and who, as the person who has produced the scripts, is able to release them with minimal effort. Take a look at the website for the Bright Sessions to see a great example of how this has been done with simplicity and elegance.

But there is one mistaken idea that I would like to re-emphasize as part of this little article before I finish. Some folks might be thinking that releasing transcripts of the show for free represents lost revenue in terms of what they could be making from script sales. I get that, and, of course, it is every producers right to determine what and whether they will give away part or all of their content. That said, those of us who have tried to sell scripts to the public can attest to how tiny that “market” is and how much more valuable web-traffic is overall. And even if you do release transcripts on your site, you can still attempt to sell the scripts in a nice, bound, dead tree version, if you wish. For those of us who enjoy scripts as a source of reading pleasure, the presence of free online scripts (I can say from experience) is no deterrent to buying them in a nicely organised, bound or e-book form. There is a strong commercial argument to be made for releasing transcripts on the website of a podcast that indicates the increased traffic is far more valuable than the tiny amount of sales revenue that might be generated.

CONCLUSION

The provision of transcripts on a website alongside the recordings of the show increases the discoverability and ranking of a podcast with search engines, provides anchors for back-links, gives journalists and reviewers (and even fans) a handy source of quotes to assist in promoting the show, provides an extra location for your sponsors message to be highlighted, and increases the accessibility of the content to people with disabilities.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a significant boon to our promotion and marketing, and not many reasons for holding back (especially if we have already produced the scripts as part of the production process in the first place). It really wouldn’t take much for us to import this particular technique for improving our ROI from the wider podcasting sphere and put it to work in audio drama.

It’s something to think about, anyway.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any thoughts regarding transcripts? I’d be very interested to hear from you. Why not comment below?

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