It’s not lost on astute industry observers that the two most successful new podcast enterprises this year – Serial and Gimlet Media – benefitted from launching on the hugely popular This American Life radio show.Īs Mark Ramsey puts it “Few have a launch platform as powerful as This American Life. Multiple companies are moving aggressively to address the challenge of audience growth. It’s telling that over 75% of podcasters list social media or word of mouth as their top two drivers of new listenership but that the majority are dissatisfied with their social media presence and see challenges overall when it comes to growth. The root cause of this dissatisfaction with audience growth is that audio discovery is broken and social media has not extended to audio beyond music. Over 75% of podcasters in our survey report that they are dissatisfied with their ability to get new users and with their app presence in particular. Without innovation in these two areas, podcasting and on-demand audio more broadly may continue to remain a narrow behavior that is experiencing a brief moment of hype similar to what it saw in 2005. Podcasters need help in growing audience and generating revenue. At the same time, we learned that two challenges threaten to stymy the emergence of podcasting. Podcasters in our survey report that the enabling tools for podcasting work well: Over 80% of respondents feel well-served in recording, hosting, and distribution. We’ve worked with over 2,500 independent audio creators in launching our app, and conducted a detailed survey of podcasters to understand how they felt about the state of podcasting going forward. If podcasting transitions to mass adoption, it can usher in a broader shift from broadcast to on-demand audio that could put much of the $65 billion audio sector up for grabs. Until now, broadcast has dominated and on-demand audio has been a small piece of the pie, limited mostly to music streaming. Podcasting also has significant implications for the $65 billion global audio sector that includes broadcast radio, recorded music, and on-demand streaming services. Understanding where podcasting is headed is important to us because we have been building, and recently released, a social audio discovery app called Clammr. We set out to develop a view on the future of podcasting. In fact, the growth rate of podcast listenership has dropped by half in the past two years. On the other hand, only 17% of the population listens to podcasts each month. Measured by Google searches and episode downloads, podcasting has seen 30+% annual growth in recent years. Podcasting is having a celebrity moment: Serial’s Sarah Koenig has appeared on The Colbert Report Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on the Tim Ferriss show and, most recently, Barack Obama visited Marc Maron’s garage to appear on his WTF podcast.īeneath the headlines, however, we see conflicting stats that lead us to ask whether podcasting is truly taking off or just getting more popular with existing diehard users.
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