Podcasting Hits the 100M Mark

Welcome to the Podnaisance.? Or…the podvolution? ? Podapalloza?

Regardless of nomenclature, Podcasting continues to show growth in 2024, now highlighted by the latest Infinite Dial - one of the most comprehensive studies on all things Audio, released recently from Edison Research .? We’ll spend the majority of this newsletter digging in but, as always, we’ll pull the topline observations out now for those looking for quick headlines.

Podcasting Is Back! (Related: Podcasting Never Left)

• Podcast has achieved material scale, with the industry now reaching almost 100M people 12+ listening to a podcast in the past week
• The gender gap in podcast (which has skewed predominantly male) continues to narrow, with a 15% increase in female listening on a monthly basis from 39% to 45% (compared to 48% for male listening)
• Per Pierre Bouvard at CUMULUS MEDIA , Podcasting should represent 5% of digital ad budgets (the Arnie Semeky “5% Solution)

Both at Podcast Movement Evolutions and at National Association of Broadcasters the general tone remains the same: the ad markets are coming back, we’re moving past green shoots and buys continue to increase.? Let’s take a deeper dive into the data and pull on some of the threads.????

“Everyone I know seems to be listening to a podcast these days…”

Let’s start by moving from the anecdotal to the quantitative.? In discussions, newsletters and general polite society, the number of people who reference pods or pick up pods continues to grow.? And this is validated by all data presented by Edison.? In a time where the fight for consumer attention, on all platforms, continues to increase, the continued growth of podcasting (and audio overall) suggests that leaving podcasting out of existing media plans is a missed opportunity to meet consumers where they are and create a truly additive component of a holistic media plan.

So let’s just do a quick review of the slides.? Familiarity with podcasting continues to grow, now with 241 million people, or 84% of total population 12+ and 67% of the population having listened to a podcast.? As we move into more consistent listening habits, close to half of all Americans have now listened to a podcast in the past month (47%) with the aforementioned 100M listening on a weekly basis.? All of this suggests both the continued growth of the overall medium, as we continue to pick up awareness and new listeners, as well as the ability to more deeply engage on a consistent basis as we convert the podcast aware and the podcast curious into the podcast committed.

And it is those 100M “podcast committed” listeners that represent the real opportunity for us, both in terms of the continued health and expansion of the medium, as well as associated revenue.? Make no mistake, podcasting, as with any media business, needs to continue to walk the line between craft and commerce.? On the content side, we need to continue to make sure that what we produce connects and that we look to make content that can continue to widen the top of the funnel, bringing in new people to the medium and, ideally, helping them to discover.? And on the platform side, continuing to evolve how we help move listeners between content, to broaden their podcast ecosystem as publishers continue to expand their offerings.? And finally, how we all work together to provide brands with an advertising experience that is easy to use, understand and engage with.? Will pull the note above taken from @ Pierre Bouvard at Cumulus on the Arnie Semsky 5% Solution.? Semsky was at BBDO and, at the start of cable, made the recommendation that clients move 5% of budgets to cable in order to understand the impact of the medium.? This, of course, resulted in meaningful gains early in the lifecycle.? And worth emphasizing, of those roughly 100M listeners, the average number of pods listened to is an astounding 8.3 per week.? As one of those 100M, the number makes sense to me but again, 8.3 podcasts a week is a lot of podcast, a lot of time, a lot of commitment, a lot of affinity.? Adding to this, study after study shows the strong and increasing efficacy of podcast advertising and this becomes a medium with both immediate impact and significant upside.

So mark our (lightly biased) words now.? 2024 will be a big year for podcasting.

And with that, the news…

Substack Partners with Spotify for Increased Distribution

• The newsletter platform Substack introduced a suite of audio tools in mid-2022 and is now partnering with Spotify which will allow podcast creators to distribute their free and gated content to Spotify for the first time?

• Substack says that among the 250 highest-revenue publications on its platform, more than half publish audio and video
• Substack joins an expanding list of publishers and platforms offering subscriber-based content powered by Spotify Open Access, including Dateline NBC, The Economist, Freaknomics Radio, Patreon, Supercast, Supporting Cast, and The Wall Street Journal, among others?

Audioboom delivers an upward-moving Q1 2024 update

• Q1 revenue: $17.1 million (+11% over year-ago Q1)
• Profit: $0.1 million (adjusted EBITDA)
• Record Q1 CPM: $52.17 (+27% from previous year)
• Record Q1 brand advertiser count: 7,839 (+ 21% from previous year)
• 1.1B impressions delivered to advertisers in March alone, representing a 10% uptick from the previous record (one billion)?

According to Stuart Last, CEO Audioboom, “2024 has started exactly as we hoped with the positive momentum of the final quarter of last year continuing”A

Milestone in Transcripts for Podcasts

• The Podcast Standards Project, a coalition of platforms dedicated to fostering open standards in podcasting, recently announced that 2.5 million podcast episodes now feature creator-supplied transcripts
• Apple Podcasts is the first major listening app to support creator-submitted transcripts, introducing full-text display ?