What will the Podcasting business look like ten years from now?
Because speculation is fun!
Update: bill irwin (growth at earwolf) issued a correction!
This estimate is literally a joke among podcast publishers. The real number is still not huge in the grand scheme of things, but it’s some multiple of 35 million (at the very least).
So the real number is perhaps closer to $100m than $35m already!
To put that in perspective, Netflix made $7b last year, and Facebook made $18b last year. So while $1b sounds like a lot of revenue, it’s not that much.
But at the same time, Podcast revenue is only expected to grow ~2% over last year. To get to $1b, we’ll have to do way better than that.
There were a lot of interesting arguments on both sides, so I decided to write it up. Here is my guided tour of the main arguments for and against podcasts.
Bear Case #1: Podcasts will become irrelevant
The hard thing about predicting the future is that most predictions aren’t proven right or wrong — they just turn out to be irrelevant.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but it turns out that a lot of people think podcasts will be completely irrelevant 10 years from now:
I don’t share this belief.
Blogging didn’t die, it evolved into two subspecies.
On the high end, blogs morphed into digital media companies like Vox Media, Buzzfeed, Slate, Gawker, Refinery 29, etc. Meanwhile, legacy media companies started creating digital-only brands such as Fusion, Quartz and FiveThirtyEight. The quantity and quality of content published exclusively on the web — and the advertising dollars funding that activity — has only skyrocketed since 2006. Sure we don’t call it “blogging” anymore, but it’s the same economic activity. And the tweets above don’t account for it.
On the low end, as was pointed out, startups like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Medium have created new media formats and network designs that made it easier for consumers to create and share media. We don’t call this blogging, and rightly so. It’s too different.
We’re seeing the same thing happen with podcasts now. In the early days, almost all podcasts were amateur-hour. Now, the ecosystem has professionalized into networks (Gimlet, Earwolf, Panoply, Radiotopia) that are not unlike early digital media companies. More recently, startups like Anchor and Bumpers are splitting off to better serve casual audio creators. The jury is still out on whether consumers will produce audio to anywhere near the degree that they are currently producing text and visual media, but to me it’s clear that the professional side of the market is poised to grow in a big, big way.
So in order to have a functioning debate, I need to clarify exactly what I mean when I use the term “podcast”. I’m talking about professionally-created original audio content distributed via the internet. I don’t mean consumer-created shortform audio where all the revenue goes to the platform (like Anchor or Bumpers or anything else that might emerge).
We might not still call them “podcasts” (for the same reason we don’t call Buzzfeed a blog), but that doesn’t mean the basic economic activity is dead. It just means we have a new label.
Bear Case #2: Platforms will dominate content creators, and take all their money
This is basically what’s happening in text-based media. It’s become nearly impossible to run a profitable media company based on banner ads alone. In fact, this shift is part of what’s causing the explosion of high quality audio and video content — it monetizes better.
There’s an argument out there that podcast creators won’t earn much money because a social network (or some new social podcast app) will figure out a way to take all the ad revenue for themselves.
I do think it’s likely that the apps we use to listen to audio in 2026 will look more like a social network and less like what we have today (essentially an audio RSS reader). But I don’t think they’ll be able to take nearly as much revenue from podcast creators as Facebook has been able to do.
Why? Because social networks are taking attention from traditional media, while any new social podcast aggregator is going to increase demand for podcasts by providing a better discovery experience.
In order to think that platforms will take money from content creators, you have to believe that user-generated content is going to take attention from professionally generated content (as is the case on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc).
I don’t think that will happen.
Bear Case #3: Self-driving cars will obliterate demand for audio content
Lots of people believe this. I even have a friend with a stealth podcasting company who told me at dinner a couple months ago that his biggest long-term worry is self-driving cars.
I agree that self-driving cars will do a lot for visual content consumption, but I don’t think it’ll obliterate the podcast market. It takes a lot to completely obliterate a market, and there are a lot of contexts besides driving where a podcast is really nice.
For example, I haven’t owned a car in years. Every time I take an uber or the subway, I’m effectively having the same experience as someone in a self-driving car. And yet I prefer to listen to podcasts. Maybe it’s just me, but also maybe not.
That being said, do I think audio is going to be as big as video? Definitely not. But that wasn’t my prediction. I just think they’re going to be making at least a billion in ad revenue, compared to the $35m they’re making now.
To put it in context, almost a trillion dollars is spent every year on advertising globally (source). About $60b of that is spent on the internet (source).
In the grand scheme of things, $1b is not all that much. Especially ten years from now. There is just so much low hanging fruit for podcasts to exploit! There are so few great shows now, the discovery and sharing mechanisms are horrible, the new user experience can be confusing, you can’t buy ads dynamically or track the results, there’s very little data on how people are engaging with content, etc.
I think all those things will get fixed, and it easily gets you to $1b.
But that’s just me! What do you think? Leave a response!
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