Three Ways To Survive Podcasting’s Existential Crisis
Podcasting has had a pretty significant year. But I have to tell you about a question I have gotten an alarming number of times from journalists over the past few months: Are we at “Peak Podcasting?” I am sure you have some opinions about that. I’ll share mine at the end. But here’s what I can tell you — peak or not, it has changed because the audience has changed.
Last year, I wrote a manifesto for growth which posited that in order to get the next batch of listeners — I called them “The 52,” for the 52 million more weekly listeners the medium needs to get to an even 100 — we would have to do things differently, because these will be different people than the ones the medium has already attracted. In other words, what got us here, is not going to get us there. This year, in a recent keynote at Podcast Movement, we put some data behind that assertion.
Podcasting has been around long enough that even though I think we are still in the early innings, there are now rookies and veterans. To examine the differences between the two, we fielded a 1,000-person online study which we weighted to our Infinite Dial numbers for podcast listeners. We also conducted a series of in-person interviews with Rookies — people who have been listening for less than six months — and Veterans — people who have been listening to podcasts for at least…
