Has podcasting failed?

Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking about my life choices. Bills, responsibilities, my football team: all of these things play on my mind during those harrowing hours between sleeping and waking. But nothing bothers me more continually than my career choices, or, in other words, my decision to start a podcast company.

When I talk about podcasting to people in the media, they often assume that I’m just a failed print journalist (which is more than a little right). They don’t take podcasting very seriously. The people who take podcasts seriously are those outside the media, who rush to tell me all the podcasts they love (“Serial, of course, and No Such Thing as a Fish. Oh, and have you heard My Dad Wrote a Porno? So funny!”). In a way, I’d rather people rolled their eyes than repeated to me how much they love the same handful of shows that everyone knows and loves. But either response makes me wonder the same question: has podcasting failed?

The latest figures from RAJAR (the body that publishes quarterly listening figures for radio, here in the UK) make interesting reading. The Q3 figures tend to be the most widely reported by radio stations, as things pick up a little over the summer, though the trend generally has been towards mitigated decline (for example, Chris Evans, highly-paid host of the Radio2 breakfast show, lost about 200,000 listeners and this was reported…