Hear how a science podcast climbed the charts in Finland

Paying attention to detail means that it all comes together in the end

Science Trip for The Masses

Henry Tikkanen, Host, Tiedetrippi Podcast, YLE, Finland

Something new from Europe in the world of podcasting is the rise of scientific podcast. Hear how a science podcast climbed the charts in Finland. 

2 years ago he was a radio host and was struggling to do science videos, not because he didn’t know what to do, but because he didn’t have enough resources.  When you don’t have video resources, you do a science podcast.

Fortunately he visited the New York science festival around that time.  They had a special guest the 3rd astronaut from the legendary flight.  Henry realised there were so many untold stories in the field of science.

Today and 46 episodes later there are 3m plays in Finland.  Finland has a population of 5.5m people.  Henry played a clip (subtitled) from his podcast, an episode about mass extinction.

Different topics from Nuclear war to mass extinction, it is whatever gets Henry excited.  The mass extinction podcast was actually about a while that lives from 200-500 years and then started to think about how many species have become extinct during the lifetime of one whale.  Turns out it has been a massacre with many animals becoming extinct.

Henry said he tells stories, and many people think the story format is an easy way out, but it is a lot of work and he does it all himself - research, interview and script.  Every episode is 15 pages, but it pays in the end.

We didn’t know it would be this popular.  It has a low budget with just a sound engineer and together they created the soundscape for the podcast because he wanted to have an audio brand, for listeners have a particular feeling.  A few months ago a Finnish poster sent a message about how much he likes the podcast, Henry sent him a branded t-shirt and a few weeks later he put a photo of him in the t-shirt on Instagram.

Paying attention to detail means that it all comes together in the end.  There is no secret, but I wanted to create  podcast that I wanted to listen to and it turned out many other people also wanted to listen to it.  You don’t always know if the content is right, but you sometimes get a feeling, and that is my secret.