Episode #7 - Hello, Is This Podcast On?
Podcasting is a fast-growing content sector with high rates of engagement
🎤Preamble
While Netflix might have killed traditional and cable TV, as well as the concept of owning content, it is hard to deny podcasts are the new radio. Chances are if you are in the millennial age bracket (or just outside of it), you’ve listened to a podcast or two before.
I truly believe that the first catalyst for sending podcasts mainstream was Serial. In 2014, season one of Serial was released, and people were hooked. Everyone was talking about Serial, as the first season centred around a real true-life murder case.
While podcasting was around before Serial, this is one of my earliest and most memorable podcasting related memories. I am sure some of you reading this were introduced to the world of podcasting through Serial.
📒Research
Year on year growth
The numbers are impressive, to say the least. Despite there being over one million podcasts out there, this Nielsen report shows that compounded growth is an average of 20%. Podcast audiences are expected to grow year-on-year, the pandemic most likely will bump these numbers up faster than expected.
A primarily young and engaged demographic
According to The Infinite Dial 2020, 37% of the US population was estimated to have listened to a podcast in the past month. The largest segment of listeners were in the 12-34 age group accounting for almost 50% of all podcast listeners.
A revenue gold mine
Despite the ongoing pandemic, podcast advertising revenue is expected to grow by almost 15% in 2020.
🧐Observations
There are over 1 million podcasts out there
Podcast audiences are growing on average 20% per year just in the US alone
There are no borders — podcasts don’t suffer from the same rights management issues that music, TV and films do. They can be distributed globally at the press of a button
There are free tools and resources to start podcasts easily
People listening to podcasts are often not doing anything else, they’re in the car
Niche podcasts seem to have larger and more dedicated audiences. Get specific
People tend to listen to podcasts via their smartphones largely
Podcasts with large followings open up opportunities to build around that audience
🔎Opportunities
Always room for more
The podcasting niche, even though it is heavily saturated, is still growing at a stable rate. Advertisers are flocking to podcasting as a medium because of its higher engagement and favourable listener statistics. Podcast consumers seemingly cannot get enough.
Niche podcasts have more listeners.
Niche podcasts have more listeners than broader/generic podcasts. If you’re a cat person, you’re more likely to take an interest in a podcast specifically about cats than a podcast about cats and dogs, or more broadly, a podcast about animals. If you’re into comedy, you listen to comedy podcasts and so on. Looking at the Apple Podcast rankings, niche podcasts dominant the rankings.
If you were to start a podcast, get specific. A generic podcast about nothing won’t get as many listeners as a podcast about something. It’s time to start that podcast about your love for the 1930’s British de Havilland Tiger Moth plane.
You don’t need to have a podcast.
The beautiful thing about podcasting is you don’t have to start a podcast of your own to take a slice of the growing pie. An entire ecosystem around podcasting is beginning to form, tools to make it easier to record podcasts, distribute podcasts, analytics to gain insights into your audience and more.
Build around the audience
Here is an idea: podcast deconstructed.
Start a blog or YouTube channel where you delve into episodes of your favourite podcasts. Maybe you take an episode of Joe Rogan and talk about some of the things you learned; things people might not have noticed and distil it down into a less time-consuming format.
Suppose a technical deep-dive on podcast episodes sounds like a lot of work, a site that bookmarks different topics discussed in a podcast allowing you to time-skip would be a worthwhile idea. How many times have you listened to a podcast on YouTube and seen someone time-link the different topics in a comment? Why isn’t that a service? Maybe it already is.
You can apply this approach to almost anything, but the dedicated audience of podcasts presents an opportunity to cater to that audience. Fan clubs, forums, Discord servers, blogs, YouTube channels, inspired merchandise.
💌In Summary
In many ways, podcasts are the new radio, the new book, the new blog and a new form of storytelling. A good podcast is both engaging and addictive; the bounce rate for a podcast once someone becomes hooked is quite low.
Until Spotify launches their highly-anticipated analytics for podcasting, right now, nobody knows specifics around podcasting audiences on a molecular level. Based on the information we do have from surveys mostly, people love podcasts and are the first-rate form of content.