Lend Us Your Ears: Apple and Blinkist Join Forces to Highlight Shortcasts on the Apple Podcast App
Apple Draws Attention to Blinkist Shortcasts in their Podcast App
Earlier this year, Apple launched their new Apple Podcast app, with Blinkist Shortcasts playing a key role in their content offering. Now, in all the Shortcast excitement, Apple reached out to Blinkist with an offer to collaborate on a new feature that will put Shortcasts in the spotlight on the Apple Podcast app.
Shortcasts are condensed versions of a podcast crafted around its key ideas. So, instead of listening to a 3-hour episode, you can listen to a Blinkist Shortcast and get the key moments in a fraction of the time.
– Rachel Mallender, VP of Content at Blinkist
Shortcasts in the Spotlight
Apple’s Shortcast feature calls attention to 7 of the 16 available Shortcasts on the Apple Podcast app, with a free episode for each show available to listen to right now. Finesse your finances with advice from So Money with Farnoosh Torabi while starting your morning and then in the evening, learn how to cook cleaner with tips from The Doctor’s Kitchen. In total, Blinkist Shortcasts offer over 200 episodes and over 50 hours of content.
Check out the list of featured Shortcasts:
- So Money
- Adventures in Happiness
- Simplify
- Beyond the To-Do-List
- The Doctor’s Kitchen
- The Baggage Reclaim Sessions
- Ctrl Alt Delete
Want to listen for yourself? Check out a free episode of the CTRL ALT DELETE Shortcast right now in the Apple Podcast or Blinkist app. All Shortcasts are also available on Blinkist.com.
With Blinkist, you will never run out of things to learn: we’re getting ready to introduce The Marie Forleo Shortcast, Dan Snow’s History Hit, and The One You Feed into the Blinkist family before the end of 2021. But keep your eyes peeled: even more content is around the corner in 2022.
A Long Story Short
The inspiration for Blinkist Shortcasts came from people like you. Blinkist surveyed its users and found that 78% of those people who regularly listen to podcasts never finish them. The most common reason why so many podcasts went unfinished? A lack of time.
Blinkist Shortcasts are the perfect shortcut for podcast lovers who want to discover new ideas fast but don’t have the time to spare. Podcast hosts work in tandem with our Blinkist team to select the essential moments from a podcast episode, which are then produced into a Shortcast. With Shortcasts, you can finally get around to listening to all those recommended podcasts you’ve heard so much about, and you don’t have to dedicate an entire afternoon to find out which ones you love.
– Rachel Mallendar, Director of New Content Development
Listen to a Shortcast on the bus, while making dinner, or even at the gym. Plus, you don’t need to worry about missing the magic of the original podcast, because each episode is recorded by the original host and stays true to the original podcast.
Audio Heroes
With over eight years of experience in making superb audio and awards to prove it, Blinkist knows how to design a punchy, engaging audio experience. This sets Shortcasts by Blinkist apart from other podcast creators who are venturing into the world of audio content subscriptions for the first time.
– 5-Star App Review
Holger Seim, CEO, and co-founder of Blinkist, discussed the process of discovering the need for Shortcasts. Similar to not having enough time to read, “[our] research revealed to us that our audience wanted to listen to more podcasts, but only had so much time they could spend doing it. With Shortcasts, we solve that problem and build off our audio expertise with Blinks to deliver an incredible, high-quality audio learning experience.”
With such great audio, Blinkist has become one of the App Store’s most successful audio content services, with over 18 million downloads worldwide. This strong track record of producing valuable audio content for subscribers has led to the Blinkist app becoming one of the highest-rated. Today, the app has over 90K five-star ratings across iOS and Android. Nearly 75% of all user ratings for Blinkist were five stars.
A Book Explained in 15 Minutes
Before Blinkist broke into the world of podcasting, it was known for breaking down the big ideas from nonfiction books (what people used to read before podcasts took over our lives). Since 2012, the Berlin-based startup has helped more than 20 million knowledge-hungry people solve one of the most common problems: too many books but too little time.
– Holger Seim, CEO of Blinkist
The Blinkist app gathers key insights from nonfiction books and shares them as 15-minute explainers. Each explainer is crafted around the core concepts of the original book and uses neuroscience to help you remember what you learn. You can read or listen to these bite-sized takes on bestselling books. Plus, there are 5,000 titles to choose from across 27 categories, including personal development, mindfulness, and psychology.
Apple, longtime Blinkist fans, featured Blinkist as an “App of the Day” more than 500 times in 2019 alone. In addition, the Blinkist app is one of the top twenty in the US App Store’s lifelong learning category, alongside TED, Coursera, and other big names.
Every Blinkist explainer is available in audio format, so if you find yourself longing for more audio, you can jump into an audio explainer for a nonfiction book. You can even check out for yourselves the great books that Podcasts hosts are reading. Farnoosh Torabi, the host of So Money, recommends her listeners read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. With Blinkist, you can get the key ideas explained to you in 13 minutes.
Die with Zero
- 13 min reading time
- audio version available
Lend Us Your Ears
You can sample Blinkist Shortcasts by taking a 3-day free trial of the Apple podcast channel or check out everything Blinkist offers with a 7-day trial of the Blinkist app. The Shortcasts by Blinkist channel is refreshed every day, so you can consistently listen to and learn from new episodes. In addition, the Blinkist app is updated every month with new explainers for bestselling nonfiction books so that you will always be in the know about what the world is reading.
Blinkist’s Shortcasts was highlighted on the Apple Podcast homepage for two weeks, from October 11th to the 24th. If you’ve missed the feature or are on another device, don’t worry: every episode is still available in Apple’s podcast app, and you can check out every episode right now on the Blinkist app.
