It started in a basement. Sarah Koenig, a producer on This American Life, a weekly radio program, had pitched a new kind of show. Instead of choosing a different theme for each episode and creating stories related to that theme, Koenig and her colleague Julie Snyder would tell a single, long story over multiple episodes. The show would follow a format as old as Dickens. Each episode would build curiosity and keep audiences keen to hear the next episode. Like many podcasts, the show would be largely recorded in Koenig’s home, in her basement with pillows and blankets to muffle the sound.
“We had to stop recording when my kids flushed the toilet,” Koenig told the BBC in 2015.
It wasn’t clear that the format of Serial would work—either technically or financially. This American Life supplied a budget for the launch but the program would soon have to generate its own revenue.
But the story that Koenig and Snyder told of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student at Baltimore’s Woodlawn High School, took off. The first episode of twelve was released on October 3, 2014 and the last episode became available on December 18, 2014. By February 9 the following year, the series had been downloaded 68 million times. Two years later, downloads had topped 80 million. In July 2020, when The New York Times announced that it was buying Serial Productions for $25 million, downloads for the first season had topped 300 million.
Serial showed that podcasts really could hold onto audiences. Not only were people willing to listen to them as they drove to work or exercised in the gym but the quality of the content that podcasts provide could be as high as anything created by public radio or by national newspapers. The Serial team showed just how far podcasts could reach.
Technically, creating a podcast appears relatively simple. There’s no need for a complete broadcast studio or a giant antenna, like a pirate radio station. A podcaster could set up shop in their basement with nothing more than a microphone and a blanket to block out environmental noise. What matters is the content. If a broadcaster gets that right, there are no limits on the audience they can gain.
The result has been that almost anyone who could buy a microphone has come to believe that they could create a podcast that repeats the success of Serial. With the right broadcasts, they could soon attract a giant audience and have people hanging off their every word. For a time it felt as though everyone was building a bedroom studio and launching their own podcast. Celebrities with their own podcasts include Alec Baldwin, Lena Dunham, Shaquille O’Neal, and RuPaul. What the mixtape was to the eighties, the podcast has become to the second decade of the 21st century, except that the people sharing their tapes are professional journalists and celebrities, as well as influencers, speakers, and mildly tech-savvy uncles with something on their minds.
And people have been listening. Helped by the growth of Spotify, which expanded its podcast content in 2018 and bought Gimlet Media, a producer of popular podcasts, audiences have leapt. In March 2019, The New York Times reported that more than half of people in the US had listened to a podcast and almost one in three listen to at least one podcast every month. Weekly listeners had grown by 14 million over the previous twelve months.
Podcasting in the Age of Coronavirus
When the coronavirus struck though, it looked as if the podcast had had its day. As lockdowns took hold and commutes shrank to the distance between the bedroom and the kitchen table, listeners found that they had less time to tune out the world and tune into their latest download. In mid-March, downloads fell by 2 percent compared to the previous week. The following week, they dropped another 8 percent. Mid-week user sessions for the Overcast podcast app were down 20 percent even as weekend usage remained the same. News podcasts stayed popular but the kind of lighter programming that would make a 40-minute car or subway journey more bearable each day shrank. Comedy and sports were all down. True crime podcasts like Serial fell the most. It wasn’t long before people started to wonder whether the world had hit “peak podcast.”
The answer appears to be ‘no’. Listeners might no longer have commutes but they still have weights to lift and walks to take and dishes to wash. According to Podtrac, a podcast analytics company, even with occasional drops, such as the one triggered by lockdowns, year-on-year growth between mid-October 2019 and the same period in 2020 was over 40 percent. Almost 250,000 new programs were launched that year and podcasters released more than 14 million new episodes.
“People are still launching podcasts rapidly,” asserts Matthew Passy, a consultant who helps podcasters create and market their content. “In fact, with the introduction of new platforms that make it easier and easier to launch a show, we are seeing a rapid expansion of the podcast market. Plus I am still seeing more and more businesses realize that podcasting is a great way to connect to their existing and potential customer base.”
Easy to Make and Good for Business
That suggests that there are two factors driving the growth of podcasts. The first is the apparent ease of content creation and distribution. Just as website-building has evolved from HTML tags to dragging and dropping elements into a Wix or WordPress template so basic podcasting is as simple as recording and uploading. Companies like Buzzsprout charge no more than $24 for up to twelve hours of content each month, and include audience stats, a podcast website, and unlimited storage.
For anyone who thinks they have something important to say, the barriers to putting their opinions in front of an audience have never been lower. And for people now forced to work from home or furloughed from jobs put on hold by a pandemic, there’s more time to experiment with podcast content between the rounds of sourdough baking.
At the same time, when companies see that it’s possible for the right content in a particular format to build an audience among those millions of weekly listeners, it’s not long before they’ll be creating their own content and trying to build a connection themselves. Just as brands have their own Facebook pages, so some brands have also produced their own podcasts. Slack launched its first podcast back in 2015, and followed it up with a new series in 2017. McDonalds produced a short podcast series called The Sauce, and even Facebook got in on the act earlier this year, with a “podcast for business in the age of connectivity.”
“There is no limitation to the potential for a brand to reach a targeted and desirable niche through the right podcast,” says Passy.
But neither of those factors is as simple as it looks—neither for individuals nor for brands. It turns out that there’s a lot more to creating a podcast than turning on a microphone and pressing “record.” Passy says that when he works with companies, brands, and individuals representing their businesses, his company does most of the editing and production work. His company launches the show, coaches the podcaster, delivers equipment training, lays out a strategy, cleans up content, performs post-production, publishes the content, and offers the client marketing advice.
“Producing a good podcast is time-consuming,” Passy says, “and their time is more valuable doing their day job.”
Slack’s podcast ended three years ago and while the company might have produced it, the content was created and broadcast by podcast expert Dan Misener. The podcast was less a channel for the company to talk directly to its customers than a new kind of sponsored content.
McDonalds’s podcast was a parody of Serial and acted as a creative apology for a sauce shortage. Of the three, only Facebook’s blog is still going strong. It’s now in its second season of talking business and is presented by an employee of the company: David Fischer, Facebook’s Chief Revenue Officer.
So for both individuals and large companies, podcasting isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Serial did well not just because it was easy and free to download and listen to, but because it offered a good story, professionally and thoroughly researched and constructed. It delivered more than a couple of people in a home studio chatting about their work in front of a couple of microphones. The reporters tracked down people connected to the story, knocked on doors, and tried to persuade people to talk.
And while brands might be attracted to the audiences available on iTunes and podcast apps, the vast amount of content they have to produce, the difficulty of producing it themselves, and the personal relationship between the broadcaster and the audience mean that it’s a much more demanding format for brands than simply scheduling posts on Facebook.
The format does work much better for personal brands though. For influencers and speakers, business value lies in the amount of trust they can build with people who might want to do business with them. A podcast is still an opportunity to show off expertise. A podcast interview is still a chance to cross-market and extend an audience even further.
And for both niche and general podcasts, the format also still offers a valuable opportunity for advertising revenue.
Getting Rich from Podcasting
Serial might have started using This American Life’s budget but as the download numbers grew, it was soon standing on its own feet. By the time the second season started, Koenig and Snyder were able to sell the podcast’s entire advertising space within a day, generating millions of dollars in revenue. According to AdvertiseCast, an advertising agency, average prices on a CPM basis for a 30-second ad is now $18, and $25 for a 60-second ad. Podcasts that reach between 100,000 and a million listeners per episode can charge as much as $29—double the rates typically earned by broadcast radio.
That can make podcasting lucrative for programs that are able to attract and hold audiences. Matthew Passy has seen advertisers pay for placements on every kind of podcast, from true crime to news, politics, business, interview shows, and religious discussions. While much of that advertising has so far been limited to national brands, he expects podcast advertising to grow more sophisticated and move towards local advertising.
“The more niche the audience, the more desirable the audience can be to the right advertiser,” he says. “I believe we have only scratched the surface in terms of the advertising potential for podcasters.”
Landing those advertising revenues though depends on building and keeping an audience, and for Passy that means being consistent. Constantly putting out good content—and enjoying what you’re putting out—will deliver returns, but audiences want to be certain that your content will be there when they want to listen to it.
“Listeners are creatures of habit,” says Passy. “I know what show I am going to listen to every day of the week during regular activities. If your show isn’t there every week, I still have to do that activity, and so I might find something else to consume. If that new show is there every week, they may have just stolen your spot.”
What two radio producers created in a basement studio is now being consumed in basement gyms. For podcasters who want to join them, the competition has never been tighter but the audiences and rewards have never been bigger.
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