Event Recap: Podcast Movement 2018 Conference
High-value audience, Google’s official entry, and brand takeaways
Podcasting is a fast-growing audio medium that is attracting a high-value audience and capturing a lot of attention from brands and advertisers alike.
This week, the Lab hopped over to Philadelphia to attend the Podcast Movement conference to find out the latest in the podcast world. Here is what we learned from this three-day conference.
High-Value Audience
In January, our friends over at MAGNA Global published a Media Economy Report titled The Power of Audio in Today’s Fragmented Marketplace, in which they examine in detail the state of the podcasting ecosystem along with information on listening behavior, demographic and audience sizes.
More and more advertisers are starting to take notice, as US podcast advertising reach $314 million in revenues, marking an 86% increase over the $169 million in 2016. The key takeaway is that brands are increasingly interested in podcasts because of the high-value audience the medium captures. This insight is something that was reiterated and reinforced at the Podcast Movement conference this week.
There are many factors behind the rapid growth of podcast advertising. For one, the growing adoption of smart speakers is bringing new attention to audio content. Podcast listeners are the kind of loyal and engaged audience that advertisers have long coveted. 21% of podcast listeners listen to 4–5 podcasts a week, and 14% percent of podcast listeners will listen to 11+ podcasts a week, according to an eMarketer report (paywall). The podcast audiences are diehard fans, so much so that for certain high profile shows the hosts will receive emails almost immediately if their shows ever miss the typical release date.
Google Gets Serious
Advertisers aren’t the only ones looking to at the opportunity within the podcast industry. At this year’s conference, everyone seems excited that Google seems to be finally getting serious about podcasts on Android. The search giant recently announced a new podcasting app for more than 2 billion Android users. Google released an actual podcast app for Android phones that lets a person download, listen and get podcast recommendations powered by Google’s AI. But calling this an app doesn’t quite do it justice, as it is more of an OS level integration.
More interestingly, this new update allows for podcasts to be surfaced and more importantly played within Google Search, using Google Assistant, through links and on their Google Home devices. An Android user doesn’t need to install an app to listen to a podcast in these three areas. Instead, the episodes are able to be played directly from an audio player which was integrated into the OS level and works with any Android device running 4.1 and up.
Google’s renewed interests in podcasts matter because they are removing as much friction as possible in order to get their user base listening and engaged. For the podcast industry, this could mean radical growth in listenership because Android users finally have an easy and user-friendly way to discover and listen to audio content that matches their interests. Android has a significantly larger user base than iOS, yet the majority of people who listen to podcasts currently use an iPhone, meaning that there is plenty of room for podcasts to grow if they can reel in the Android users.
Google has been quiet about any potential strategies for monetizing podcasts. However, it is not hard to imagine they are looking at podcasting as their next great frontier for ad revenues. To improve the podcasts that are surfaced for a search result, they are working on a tech solution that will run a speech to text process on the full MP3 that will allow their RSS crawlers to better index the information contained within an episode. This will allow Google’s AI to index the content of any particular podcast episode and their website descriptions, therefore making podcasts searchable on Google, therefore further boosting the visibility of this growing medium.
Podcasts by Subscription
The subscription model is taking the content industry by storm, but can podcasts follow the trend and go ad-free? This is an ongoing debate within the podcasting industry that we saw at the conference this week. At first glance, this model is obviously attractive to the creators, as it would bring a direct cash flow that they can invest back into their production without having to rely on advertising. However, there are a few challenges that make this model less practical for podcasts.
First, consumers are used to listening to podcasts for free. Getting consumers to pay for any content is already hard enough; asking consumers to pay for a product that was once free, could be enough to stop dead the adoption of the subscription model. Second, once a paywall is up, piracy would inevitably emerge as a big challenge for content creators to content with. The open ecosystem that podcasts have today is not set up to support private podcasts. One key characteristic of podcast distribution is that it is channel/app-agnostic. Adopting the subscription model would force consumers to download, pay, and subscribe to whichever app or network had exclusive rights to the content they want to hear, thus taking away that freedom that makes podcasts so open and accessible today.
Despite the challenges, some companies are exploring options to make this happen. For example, legacy podcast hosting platform Libysn has a premium service to support paid subscriptions for business users on its platform. Similarly, Ustudio is a new startup specializing in facilitating private podcasts for training and other business use cases. The fact that both are geared towards the enterprise market is illustrative of the challenges that the podcast world faces in adopting the subscription model.
Brand Takeaways
While not new — it has been around for a decade — podcasting is an easy way for brands to experiment with an emerging media channel with a high-value engaged audience. From programmatic ad insertions, to custom native ads read by hosts, to developing a branded original series, there are many ways for brands to activate in the podcasting space today. It is up to brands to work closely with podcast creators to figure out what the best approach for their campaigns is.
As an added sign of confidence in the podcasting industry, the IAB will be hosting the 4th ever Podcasting upfront this September in NYC. If you’re curious about how your brand can best tap into this growing audio medium and capture a high-value audience, please reach out to our VP of Client Services Josh Mallalieu (josh@ipglab.com). The Lab is here to help!
