The State of Enterprise Podcasting

8 min readAug 29, 2019

While hobby podcasting is (thankfully) saturated, bigger publishers are just getting started.

As long as I’ve been at Morning Brew, readers have been asking to become listeners. We get emails like this all the time:

We couldn’t have taken these messages seriously even if we wanted to. As a small team we had to stay fully focused on creating 1 email newsletter every day. Now we are a team of 20 sending 11 newsletters per week, and we have our sights set on a new medium: audio. Since launching Retail Brew, our second industry newsletter, Kinsey and I have been studying up on the wide world of podcasting.

What did we learn after a summer of research? We are nowhere near peak podcasting.

Let’s check out a few headlines from this year:

February: Barstool is (very profitably) upending sports media.
February: Himalaya raises $100m for a production studio, podcast platform and audio content network trifecta.
February: Spotify earmarks $400–$500 million for podcasting.
March: Luminary pulls back the curtain on its paid platform with $100 million in funding.
June: The Obamas sign an exclusive audio deal with Spotify.
July: Apple flirts with original content.
August: Entercom (Radio.com) buys production companies Pineapple Street Media and Cadence13.

For good measure, let’s check out the economics:

Podcasting generated 2.6% of what radio banked in 2018. What we have hit is peak hobbyist podcasting.

As in:

There are 750,000 active podcasts on Apple Podcasts.
Podcasts hosted on Libsyn that have “more than 37,000 downloads were better than 99% of all other shows”. At that scale, a weekly show barely scratches $100k in annual revenue. To an individual podcaster, that’s great money. To a business, not so much.

The barrier to entry is incredibly low, which is awesome for a healthy media environment. Anyone should be able to fill the airwaves Dusty-Bun and Suzie-Poo style. But we’re not all playing with ham radios anymore — there are new trends that have caused a sudden stir in audio:

Mobility. With our smartphones and our AirPods, we can listen anywhere and multitask while doing it.
Constant consumption. We’re all trying to reduce screen time and podcasts allow us to keep consuming guilt-free.
On-demand programming. The convenience of on-demand video trickling to audio.
Serial. This was the “killer app” for podcasting. The medium needed a die-hard fan base. Americans addicted to crime content provided that spark.

And with these trends, the industry has some momentum:

Legacy publishers like NPR, the WSJ, the NYT, and WaPo are providing free audio content despite their collective shift toward paywalls.
Legacy radio players like Westwood One, Entercom, and iHeart are investing in new content and working to make existing content accessible digitally.
Podcast natives like The Ringer, Barstool, Crooked, and Vox are cruising in a year of rough media news.
Other media companies like TheSkimm, The Hustle, Digiday, Robinhood Snacks, and Loose Threads all have low-production, high-quality podcasts.

*Note: not comprehensive (who’s *cough* ☕️*cough* missing?)*

Today’s multitude of media companies seemingly all utilize different business models, but there are some shared levers publishers can pull to align podcast strategies and business goals.

Type of show

Regardless of medium, I like to use a framework that outlines 4 types of content objectives.

News shows that continuously keep listeners up to date create sticky habits. They hook listeners with reporting — the writers’ thought process, the sounds at the scene, and the drama from the story.
Entertainment shows are more intimate than articles and allow publishers to 1) create celebrity around a clever creator and 2) dive deeper using a more attention-grabbing format.
Interview shows allow publishers to expose audiences to new personalities. These shows attract the guest’s audience to the content producer’s brand and help build relationships with individuals at the guest’s company.
Education shows have taken off in China under a paid model. While most content educates, overt self-help and school-like programming has huge potential.

Content shelf life

Our daily newsletter (you thought I wouldn’t plug?) is the most timely content, but timely content can spoil within a few days of publishing. Inversely, evergreen content provides the consumer the same value a year out that it did when it was first published. But I’m hot on the idea of evergrey: content that is relevant on a seasonal level. It’s timely so there’s a “need” to listen, but the content isn’t sensitive to the point where a news cycle can invalidate or erase its value. Timeliness can drastically alter profitability. Evergreen shows can consistently gain new listeners on the long tail and hold sold in perpetuity, while timely shows may only get a quarter or two of premium CPM sales.

Episode frequency and length

I’m paying attention to sellable inventory. The longer the podcast, the more ads that can run. The more often episodes drop, the more ads that can run. Consistent drops allow for more consistent listening, but that can vary across show type. These levers can dramatically alter profitability while barely impacting costs.

Let’s say a media company has kick-ass content built for audio (because chasing 👏 formats 👏is 👏 bad). That content fits into a larger podcast ecosystem:

Record

There are a ton of tools. Adobe Audition ($85/month) is a good legacy option that’s easy to learn pretty quickly. Then there are new tools built specifically for podcasting like Alitu. But there’s a little thing called sonic identity that is actually super important and trendy. A sonic identity requires a mix of marketing and music production and allows brands to enhance retention and evoke emotion.

Host

The completed audio file is then uploaded to an RSS feed that enables listening platforms to play the audio. There’s a lot of software to meet different needs, but the ecosystem can be broken into three tiers:

Enterprise: Megaphone, Acast, ART19 and Omny.

All are pretty similar and offer dynamic ad insertion, scalable bandwidth, geo-targeting, analytics, and programmatic marketplaces. All do not disclose pricing online and require a sales relationship.
Art19 is the first hosting service to earn podcast measurement compliance with IAB, a 3rd party service that verifies listen and download metrics.
Acast has a built-in cross promotion network to help with initial growth.
Relative to other media software, these do not break the bank.

2. Self-service, with monetization tools: Wooshkaa, Anchor, Libsyn, Audioboom, Blubrry and Castos.

These services provide enhanced monetization tools with fancy UIs. Anyone can sign up online and most offer freemium plans. For publishers without fully built out teams, these options are great.

3. Self-service, without monetization tools: Simplecast, Transistor, Buzzsprout, Podbean, Soundcloud, Spreaker, Wordpress, Backtracks, Fireside, Podomatic, Red Circle, Zencast, Podigee and Squarespace.

These provide basic tools to get on audio platforms and provide a basic content management system for the independent podcaster.

In between these media/feed hosting providers, there is a layer of feed redirect services that enhance tracking capabilities. Major players include Feedburner, Podtrac and Chartable.

Distribute

Apple and Spotify dominate the market. We surveyed the Morning Brew audience and found that 84% of podcast listening occurs on one of those two apps. Apple will continue to benefit from the power of defaults and will hold its lead if it actually takes pods seriously. Spotify is making strides in the space by investing in technology (Anchor), content (Gimlet) and product (the music/podcasting split in ‘Your Library’, Daily Drive).

Paid platforms are starting to gain traction. Luminary is carving out a space by investing in tech and content—a combination that will pay off in the long run as paywalls go up everywhere else in digital media. Luminary has a few competitors (Glow, Majelan) that will hopefully scale and push the market further. YouTube and radio syndication can also provide interesting opportunities to increase reach outside of true podcasting platforms.

It’s getting easier to find podcasts outside of these apps. Google is improving automated transcription to streamline SEO rankings and sites like Pod Hunt help curate popular shows.

I’m not sure if the platforms will stay this decentralized. Podcasts are still distributed via RSS feeds (tech developed in 1999 by Netscape…) so it’s remarkably easy to transfer your subscriptions from one app to the next with just a few taps. The field will remain fragmented unless 1) publishers start signing exclusive platform deals or 2) certain players implement social features to create network effects. Otherwise, UI and discovery improvements will become incremental features rather than defensible strategies.

There’s a lot of noise in the audio space -

We have (thankfully) hit peak hobbyist podcasting.
We have plenty of consumer demand for high quality audio programming.
Enterprise podcasting is nascent (look, I had to use the word once in a pod blog. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them).
The tech stack is quickly developing to meet the needs of enterprise publishers.
The podcasting ecosystem is far from saturated and will look completely different in 12 months. Stay tuned.

We’re excited and I hope you are, too. Please reach out (josh@morningbrew.com) if you want to partner, challenge any of my perspectives, or just chat pods.

Big thanks to Kinsey for the editing help and Brahm for research assistance.