Meaningful episode art is seldom used in podcasts, and is seldom surfaced in podcast player list views. I don’t know the cause and effect, but suffice to say that they aren’t a meaningful driver of engagement.
Titles for Running in Production are complicated. They are bland but I can’t see how they could be any better. It’s a solo host podcast, with no recurring guests, by design, so there’s no development of the sort of in-show culture that invites funny titles.
Point is, titles and thumbnails matter. After reading the other replies, it even seems it's the main criticism regarding this podcast.
> They are bland but I can’t see how they could be any better
I clicked randomly on "uscreen Is a Platform That Helps Content Creators Build a Business"[1]. This title is awful, I stand by it. It doesn't carry anything interesting about the content and sounds like an ad, like all the other titles.
However, the "Topics Include" section contains something that caught my eye: "BREAKING NEWS: Rails can scale and it’s working out nicely for them as a monolith". "uscreen scaled a Rails monolith to xxx users per day", "Scaling a Rails monolith" or "Rails monoliths can scale" are titles I would have clicked on. And I don't even use Rails.
No idea who Simon Cowell is BTW.
[1]: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/104-uscreen-is-a-pla...
- not one of the titles made me want to click. They all sound like sponsored content / ads. I don’t click on ads.
- nothing catches my eye. You need thumbnails, visuals. Maybe some logos, maybe an illustration regarding something specifically fun or interesting that was said in the podcast
- I tried listening to a podcast to give you feedback on the audio but honestly couldn’t decide which one to click on. See first point
You really need to work on your titles, they’re that bad and probably the main problem. Even if I subscribed, I wouldn’t listen to new episodes because the titles don’t attract me at all.
In cooking shows they often make a segment where the judges don’t even eat the plate if it doesn’t pass a visual judgment. You don’t pass the visual judgment.