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Greetings, salutations, and thanks for reading Fast Companys Plugged In. On August 4, Amazon announced that it was restructuring its Wondery podcast studio. The companys CEO and about 110 employees are leaving. Those who remain are being divvied between Amazon’s audiobook arm Audible and a new group called Creator Services, reported The New York Timess Jessica Testa. Observers, including my colleague Grace Snelling, connected Amazons reevaluation of Wonderys future with YouTubes emergence as, arguably, podcastings dominant platform. As of October 2024, according to Edison Research, the video giant had more podcast listeners than Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Calling podcast fans listeners may already be an anachronism, though: In February of this year, YouTube itself claimed 1 billion podcast viewers. Overall, says Edison, Americans spend 773 million hours per week consuming podcasts, up more than 350% in a decade. That translates into 7.7 hours per week per podcast consumer. The medium has changed tremendously in those 10 years. Back in 2015, the hottest podcast was the spellbinding true-crime show Serial, which won a Peabody Award that April after debuting in October 2014. It proved that podcastinglike terrestrial radio in its pre-TV golden agecould conjure up a theater of the mind. A podcast could keep you on the edge of your seat, maybe even more so because you provided the visuals yourself. In Serials wake, plenty of compelling narrative podcasts did emerge. Still, the field always seemed a little stunted. True crime provided a disproportionate percentage of shows, as you can tell from the titles of such Wondery series as Dr. Death, Killer Privilege, Morbid, American Scandal, and Blood and Vines. As engrossing as tales of murder and scandal can be, I expected more kinds of stories to emerge over time. Instead, storytelling in general has been on the wane. Podcasting is now awash in talking headshosts gabbing with guests about a given topic, most often relating to current events. Im not knocking shows dedicated to discussion of news of the day: I consume scads of them and appear on my share. Yet I do feel a twinge of sadness that theyve overwhelmed other types of programming. A medium capable of anything has morphed into a giant talk show. This trend helps explain why podcasts have become so important to YouTube, and vice versa. As the medium has focused on conversation, its become typified by hosts who are glib and charismatic, such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy, and Armchair Experts Dax Shepard. You dont have to like all of them to acknowledge that theyre vivid personalities and good at expressing themselves in a memorable way. That gives them a lot in common with the creators who have long attracted mass audiences on YouTube. Some audio-only podcasts are repurposed on YouTube without a real visual element. But the ones that feel at home are full-blown video productions. Sometimes, theyre shot with fancy equipment in a studio and meticulously edited; other times, their production values are reminiscent of a staff meeting held on Zoom. Either way, video podcastings popularity on YouTube shows that it can command attentioneven if all youre seeing is people sitting around and chatting. Now, video podcasts are hardly newIve somehow managed to hold on to a few I downloaded 15 years ago using Apples iTunes, which helped popularize podcasts in the first place. Apples present-day Podcasts app supports video as well. Meanwhile, Spotify has lately been beefing up its video experience, adding features such as the ability to flip back and forth between video Joe Rogan and audio-only Joe Rogan in mid-podcast. Even so, the recent boom in video podcasting may have snuck up on the rest of the industry. And in case you havent noticed, its tough to beat YouTube at creating an environment thats conducive to watching video. App developers taking video at least as seriously as audio might be critical to the future of podcasting, a mode of communication that has thrived in part because its so open. Theres no vast content repository controlled by a single company; instead, podcast feeds run on RSS, which is why you can subscribe to all your favorite shows in the app of your choice. (From 2020 to 2024, when a deal reportedly worth $200 million made The Joe Rogan Experience exclusive to Spotify, it wasnt a podcast by the strictest sense of the term.) By its nature, RSS also respects privacy: Creators can tell how many downloads theyre getting, and can detect subscribers IP addresses, but they cant use data on individual listeners for ad targeting or other purposes. YouTube lets creators pipe RSS feeds of their podcasts onto the platform to automate their distribution. But a pedant might contend that theyre no longer podcasts once they get there. Theyre just YouTube shows monetized via YouTube advertising, inhabiting a parallel universe distinct from RSS-powered podcasting as it exists in other apps. Which is why not all podcasts are available on YouTube and nobody assumes that every YouTube show will be available elsewhere. Last year, Google doubled down on YouTube as its podcasting hub by discontinuing its own podcast app in favor of YouTube Music. As that apps name indicates, its mostly a portal to stuff on YouTube. But it does let you subscribe to podcasts by plugging in their RSS feeds. That preserves a link to podcasting in its most open form, even if its more of a backup than the primary interface. None of this matters much as long as the greater podcast ecosystem beyond YouTube remains viable. Id be alarmed if YouTube started cutting exclusivity deals for popular podcasts, or if its position grew so commanding that creators just didnt bother making their shows available elsewhere. So far, neither scenario is panning out. Heres hoping they never do. Its fine for the lines between podcasting and YouTube to blur a bitas long as they dont fade away altogether. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can ceck out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Instagram launches map feature. It looks a lot like Snap MapThe new opt-in tool lets users see friends’ real-time locations, explore creator-recommended spots, and leave notes on a shared map. Read More Character.AI launches social feed to let users interact, create, and share with AI personasThe new Character.AI feed brings social-media-style features to its app, allowing users to post chat snippets, share AI-generated videos, and co-create content with more than 100 million virtual characters. Read More Pinterest’s male audience is booming. Here’s what they’re searching forPinterest now counts more than 171 million male users, driven by Gen Z interest in wellness, grooming, AI tools, and fatherhood content. Read More Roku’s new streaming service, Howdy, looks like McDonald’s. Here’s why it’s geniusThe budget streamer is setting itself apart from the crowd with a color scheme that no one else has dared to try. Read More Inside World, the first-ever human verification brandTools for Humanity CMO John Patroulis talks about the brand strategy behind World, the Orb, and being human in the AI age. Read More Is Elon Musk’s behavior making liberals dislike all EVsnot just Teslas?The ‘Tesla backlash effect’ might be impacting the broader EV market. Read More
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E-Commerce
Crypto is booming again. Bitcoin is near record highs, Walmart and Amazon are reportedly exploring stablecoins, Robinhood is tokenizing shares of public and private companies, and NFTsonce left for deadare stirring back to life. Even crypto-powered network states are inching toward reality. But one star from the last bull run hasnt joined the rally: the metaverse. Back in 2020 and 2021, the metaverse was the tech industrys favorite toyan immersive digital frontier where wed work, play, and shop. Facebook rebranded to Meta, VR headsets flew off shelves, and internet searches for metaverse jumped 7,200% in a single year. JPMorgan called it a $1 trillion opportunity that would likely infiltrate every sector. Decentraland was among the breakout stars of the metaverse, a bustling virtual city with casinos, concerts, branded events from Dolce & Gabbana to Nestlé, and even a JPMorgan lounge. But now, in 2025, the future of the internet looks far from the Ready Player One-esque revolution once promised. Once-booming world hits record low Built on the Ethereum blockchain and powered by its own cryptocurrency (dubbed MANA), Decentraland allowed users to buy and sell land as non-fungible tokens and customize avatars with tokenized wearables. Blockchains, NFTs, and Web3 overall are similar,” says Matthew Ball, CEO of the venture capital firm Epyllion. “There are those who believe these technologies and/or systems will be needed to build the metaverse, others who say its the best way to do so, and some who believe that these technologies are irrelevant to the metaverse and in general. While some saw Decentraland as a financial opportunity, most used it to socialize, attending concerts by artists like Grimes, Ozzy Osbourne, and Björk, or gambling in a virtual casino that reportedly generated $7.5 million in just three months. But last year, reports surfaced claiming the once-thriving world had become a ghost town, with fewer than 50 active users during a 24-hour period. Other blockchain-based worlds have also struggled to maintain engagement. The Sandbox, another decentralized platform, has attracted just 5.7 million usersin totalsince its founding in 2011. Decentraland refuted the low usage claims, asserting that it had 8,000 daily active users instead. Still, user sentiment paints a complicated picture. One Reddit user shared their early excitement but noted they “lost interest for a number of reasons,” citing poor user experience, low engagement, and abandoned projects. I wanted it to work, perhaps it still could, but not without an enormous overhaul to the overall design and leadership approach. Others had similar experiences: Some made money and left, while others simply moved on. Made a shit ton of money from it,” one Reddit user said, “but when crypto winter came in 2021, that shit died. Another added: Used to log in during COVID and play in the casino for fun. There was never anyone around even then. Crypto-based worlds taking the back seat When asked for more recent figures, the Decentraland Foundationthe nonprofit overseeing the open-source platformreported 2.3 million unique visitors to platform properties and 24 million all-time unique visitors. At Decentraland, we believe success in a virtual world isnt measured by how many people log in every day, Decentraland Foundation marketing chief Kim Currier tells Fast Company. Daily active users is a metric borrowed from social media and gaming platforms that are designed to keep people endlessly scrolling or grinding. Thats never been our goal. Instead, the foundation emphasizes engagement. More than 274,000 friendships accepted, 19 million chat messages exchanged, and over 616 million Emotes [actions for your avatar like dance moves or a wave] expressed to date, Currier shared. These are signs of real presence and connection. To improve user experience, the foundation has continued to build. In October, it made a major shift from a browser-based platform to a downloadable desktop version. It also removed the requirement for Web3 wallets, aiming to make the platform more accessible. According to the foundation, the desktop version has been downloaded over 196,000 times. It added that third-party usage trackers can no longer reliably measure activity. Any numbers they share today are outdated and incomplete, a foundation spokesperson tells Fast Company. Changing expectations While blockchain-based metaverse platforms havent taken off as once expected, others have succeeded in offering immersive digital experiences without relying on VR or cryptocurrency. Theyre thinking, like, way further in the future, Currier says. The misconception is that the metaverse is something where you put a headset on and youre fully immersed in a world that is photorealistic and completely different from your physical experience. Many see the metaverse as VR, because when Zuckerberg renamed Facebook, their sole produt in market was a VR headset, Ball notes. Still, he adds, the technology isnt advanced enough yet, and its not essential for the metaverse to exist. I think now we are in a place where people have more realistic expectations about whats physically possible and technologically possible, Currier says. Todays metaverse may look more like platforms such as Roblox or Minecraftvast, user-driven spaces where social interaction is central. The clearest market leader is Roblox, a virtual world platformand one which described itself as a metaverse company long before Facebook or Microsoft ever declared for the same ambitions, Ball says. He points out that during Roblox Corp.s IPO, the word metaverse appeared in its SEC filing 16 timesmore than it ever had before. As the dust settles on early hype, the concept of the metaverse is also shifting in how its meant to fit into peoples lives. At Decentraland, we really, firmly believe its not meant to replace your real life, Currier says. People are spending a little bit more time in the physical world with their real families, their friends, and thats okay.
Category:
E-Commerce
Appliance-maker SharkNinja has a reputation for creating smart, viral appliances, from a frozen slushy-maker to an LED cryo-mask to an indoor-outdoor fan with an ingenious cooling mist attachment. Key to SharkNinjas success is its ability to create both ultra-functional products (vacuums, air fryers, blenders) and ones that take consumers by surprise, especially on social media. And despite the challenges posed by President Trumps ever-evolving trade deals, the company continues to grow: Net sales were up 16% year-over-year in Q2 2025. I spoke to SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas about where his teams find the company’s next big idea, how quickly it can move from idea to being in stores, and which category SharkNinja’s expanding into in September. SharkNinja has been expanding its product portfolio. The company went from selling blenders and vacuums to the beauty category, launching hair stylers and more recently an LED face mask. How do you decide which categories to enter? Our innovation comes from identifying known or unknown consumer problems. You could be a consumer products company and you could build your product roadmap off of a core technology. If you do that, it will lead you only to the places that core technology is applicable to. We think there’s an endless number of consumer problems to be able to solve, which is why over the last 17 years we’ve gone into 37 different product categories. On any given day we’re focused on making robots, on skincare, on outdoor cooking, on haircare, on cleaning, on air purification, on fans. [Photo: SharkNinja] Does that mean you have customers coming to you and saying, I want something to curl my hair and I also want a slushy machine? We have a team of consumer insights researchers that are constantly looking at online reviews, negative sentiments, social media sentiment. We have people that are in consumer homes every day, they’re in restaurants, they’re in commercial environments. And we’re constantly mining the next problems to be able to solve. On any given quarter, we will run things called hack weeks where we’ll set up a team of 8 to 10 people and we’ll have them go and hack on a particular problem or idea that they have. That could range from the consumers doing something outside the home that they’re not able to do inside of the home. The consumer used to have to go to a med spaso we developed an LED infrared cryo mask for them to be able to do that at home. SharkNinja’s planning on introducing 25 new products this year. How long does it take between having an idea for a product and putting it on the market? We launch 25 new products a year. Thats not a new color or a new knob. That’s a new, ground-up, from-scratch product. We’ll start with a pipeline of anywhere from 50 to 60 ideas. Ideas will eventually weed themselves out because the technology is something we might not have right now, the product might be too expensive, or the consumer might not be ready for it. We just launched our first FDA-approved product, the Shark Cryo Globe mask. That took two and a half years for us to develop. We take anywhere from 12 to 16 months to bring technology we already have to market. If it’s a completely new technology, we think that two and a half years is about the time for us to be able to do that. Whats an example of a product that consumers werent ready for? In New York, they passed a law around composting. That’s a new thing for the majority of New Yorkers, and it’s not something that exists really in lots of other areas of the country today. We think that as consumers start composting, there’s going to be some real challenges. They’re sitting there with a plastic little bin full of fruit flies and dealing with the smell of six days worth of food scraps. Our team got really motivated and excited about wanting to solve that problem. The challenge is that the problem is not yet well understood by the consumer. They’re going to need to compost for a year. It’s going to have to get beyond just New York. It might be something that is a great idea, but we might be too early on the cycle for it right now. Maybe as we get into 2026 and 2027, we pull it back out of the roadmap and say, now is the time where the consumer will really be able to listen to this story. SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas [Photo: SharkNinja] What’s an example of a product that you wanted to make, but the tech isn’t there? We believe there are lots of unmet needs in the lawn care space, but from a technology standpoint right now, we don’t have a solution that the world needs us for. Its important to recognize, when we go into a category, that we have to answer the question: Why does the world need us? Why does the consumer need us? Are we doing it cheaper? Are we bringing something to the consumer that they’re not able to get anywhere else? If we can’t answer that question, then it’s not a category for us to expand into. Is the same team of engineers coming up with all of these products across categories? We have 1,300 engineers around the globe. They’re based in Boston, London, and Asia. And I think one of the exciting things about being an engineer and working at SharkNinja is that you can find your next job at SharkNinja. If you’re an engineer that’s working on haircare andyou’re interested in thinking about outdoor cooking, you can go on the outdoor cooking team, you can switch to the robotics team, you can switch to the slushy team or the air fryer team or the air purifier team at SharkNinja. We’re constantly cross-pollinating ideas across the global engineering teams. There’s mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, people working on IoT (internet of things). Were bringing all of those pieces together to bring as much technology as possible into a product that could sell for on average for $199 to $239. How have you been affected by tariffs? That process started for us way back in the first Trump administration. When tariffs went into effect five years ago, 35% of our products were tariffed at that time coming into the United States at 25%. Prior to that, 100% of our production was made in China. Four and a half years ago, we started making our first product outside of China, and by the end of Q2, we moved primarily to Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia. There really isn’t any necessarily safe haven other than manufacturing the products in the United States, but four and a half years ago is when we started making our first product outside of China. By the end of this month, we’ll be able to make nearly 90% of our production outside of China. By the end of the year, we will have nearly 100% of our production outside of China. So has it had an impact? Of course, it’s had an impact, but I think that we’ve got a highly diversified supply chain. I think we’ve developed a really high-quality, fast-turn, low-cost supply chain that’s been a real competitive advantage for the business. Have you passed any costs onto consumers? We have had to pass some costs onto consumers. We’ve tried everything possible to keep that to an absolute minimum. So much of the way we think about our business is what we call affordable, accessible innovation. We really want to make products for almost everyone. You could buy a Ninja product for $49; you could buy one for $999. You could buy a Shark product for $59 or buy one for $899. What’s so core to the Shark or Ninja brands is you could be a Walmart shopper and be a SharkNinja consumer. You could be a Sephora shopper and be a SharkNinja consumer. I don’t think there’s another brand out there that has as large a socioeconomic group of consumers as us. At least on TikTok, there’s a widespread perception the Shark hair products are an affordable dupe for Dyson products. I actually think that’s probably helped you sell quite a few units. How do you respond to those comments? In every industry, a brand has to find their white space in the market. For us, that white space is market leading performance, great quality, and great value. I think that the products that we bring to market are much more versatile. You bring up our haircare. We looked at products in the market and we saw that products were really single-use products. You had to buy a hairdryer, you had to buy a styler, you had to buy a brush. We don’t think the consumer wants to have four different products to be able to do their hair. We saw that unmet need and we developed a product called the Shark FlexStyle. If you have a great experience with one of our products, you’re willing to try us as you go into [a different] category. I think that really helped us get into the beauty business. [Consumers thought] they had a great experience with a Shark vacuum or a Shark air purifier or a Shark steam mop. Let me now try them in haircare. You have products across categories, price ranges, and retailers. How do you market them? We sell our products in every major retailer in every major market. We’re one of the most searched brands on Amazon. We have a robust direct-to-consumer business. We want to be relevant wherever the consumer chooses to shop for our products. It’s our job to create consumer demand through viral marketing, and ultimately, it’s up to the consumer to decide where they want to shop for the product, whether they want to shop at a brick-and-mortar store or online or they want to go direct-to-consumer. We just want to be relevant wherever they choose to shop. On the marketing side, I think what’s so interesting is we were a company 16 years ago that only marketed [via] long-form infomercials. I mean, my partner and I at the time didn’t have any money. We would run 30-minute TV infomercials. Fast forward to today and we have seven times more social media engagement than our nearest competitor. Our products not only go viral on social media, but they generate a tremendous amount of user-generated content. What’s the next category you want to get into? In September we’ll be launching a new outdoor category. Weve publicly stated that we feel like we can enter two new product categories a year as we move forward.
Category:
E-Commerce
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