Making Podcasts Easier
Or… Creating For An Unknown Medium
Like many Medium readers, I exist in a bit of a cultural bubble. The primary way I communicate with colleagues is by email or Slack, because in-person communication is so 1995. When I travel across town, I hail a ride on Uber instead of calling a taxi. When I’m listening to music, odds are it’s on Spotify instead of on a CD. And when I’m listening to a talk show or a radio program, it’s by podcast… and not on the radio.
There are a lot of people in my shoes. According to survey data from Edison Research, 21% of Americans over the age of 12 listened to a podcast in the last month. That percentage jumps to 36% when you include every teenager and adult who’s ever listened to a podcast.
Podcasts, despite the best efforts of Serial and Marc Maron, still don’t have the cultural reach of FM radio or broadcast television in their glory days. However, 21% of Americans equals an audience of approximately 68 million listeners…. which is, well, goddamn huge.
Despite that huge audience, there are two major problems facing podcasters: It’s incredibly hard to make money from podcasts, and incredibly hard for listeners to find podcasts.
The Monetization Problem
Podcast creators have a hard time making money from their creations. No matter whether a podcast is a hobbyist’s labor of love or a slick professional production, it’s hard making money from podcasts.
According to a 2014 estimate by New York’s Kevin Roose (that’s no doubt outdated, but recent statistics are fiendishly difficult to track down), podcast advertisements sell for $20-$45 per thousand listeners. These numbers are great for larger podcasts — as well as companies like Stamps.com, Legalzoom, Mailchimp, and Squarespace that aggressively advertise to podcasts — but are pretty negative for smaller podcasts with under 10,000 listeners.
More challenging for the podcasting masses, however, is the scattershot nature of finding advertisers and generating profits (or at least recouping losses) from starting a podcast.
One podcaster, Nick Loper of the Side Hustle Show, recently published a detailed article on how he makes money from his podcast… and the economics of it are fascinating.
Loper monetizes his podcast through a mixture of affiliate sponsorships where listeners are given promotional codes for products or services (which net him $382 over the period of a few months), promotions for his own books and products (which generated approximately $210), and affiliate links for guests’ products and services (which generated $620 in income).
These numbers are great for podcasting as a hobby — but, combined with the $20–$45 per 1000 listener rate, mean podcasting as a full-time job is something largely limited to only employees of well-funded organizations or the independently wealthy.
Equally difficult is the fact that no company has managed to successfully pull off the act of brokering advertising for podcasts — several companies have, but they have yet to generate significant market share (Scripps’ Midroll is one significant exception, but they primarily serve established podcasts with large audiences). Every time you hear an ad for Squarespace or Dollar Shave Club on a podcast, the odds are good the podcast creator brokered that ad deal themselves.
Tracking down advertisements and partnerships is a significant burden for creators of smaller, indie podcasts — nearly all of whom already have day jobs or personal commitments taking up the bulk of their time.
We have to move on, but FiveThirtyEight has a wonderful guide to the economics of podcasts if you’re so inclined.
The Discovery Problem
There’s a second problem facing podcast creators: It’s fiendishly difficult to find out who’s listening to their podcasts, and it’s equally hard for listeners to discover podcasts.
This is due to two factors — The disproportionate influence of Apple and iOS on podcast discovery and analytics, and the changing way listeners discover podcasts.
According, again, to Edison Research, 64% of podcast listeners tune in most often through their smartphones or tablets and 36% through a desktop or laptop computer. A 2015 Clammr report goes on to explain that 82% of mobile listening takes place through the iPhone.
The fact that a large plurality of podcast listeners access and discover content through Apple devices means that Apple — whether they admit it or not — serve as the de-facto gatekeepers of content discovery.
To make a not-altogether-perfect metaphor, its almost as if your radio manufacturer in the 1940s or television manufacturer in the 1960s could decide which stations were most easily accessible by your living room sets.
Adding to the challenge is that Apple has been famously cagey when it comes to sharing data with podcast creators. Podcast creators can’t do much more than make educated guesses when it comes to listenership that discovers their programming through Apple.
And, for audiences, it’s hard to discover new and interesting content. A podcast that is not listed in the iTunes Store for any reason will have a much harder time reaching listeners. It’s wonderful that Apple curates the Podcast app and podcast discovery, but there’s no other voice that can compete with Apple when it comes to promoting new and interesting podcasts.
The two problems are tied together: Podcasters can’t make more than educated inferences into who’s listening to their product, and listeners have a harder time discovering new content that hasn’t been annointed by Apple.
Despite the best efforts of alternate podcast listening platforms such as Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and Pocket Casts, Apple holds the best hand of cards in the great podcast discovery game.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Before we go on, there’s one important caveat: I don’t currently have a podcast of my own, and work as a tech journalist and content consultant — not as someone who works with podcasts, advertising, and audience analytics on a daily basis.
With that said, there are three things that pop out to me:
- Some enterprising entrepreneur needs to create a stable, effective marketplace that matches sponsors and advertisers with small/beginning podcasts. I am not sure if this is economically viable at the moment on the entrepreneurial side, but it would make things much easier to smaller podcasters.
- Podcast discovery and listening has to become easier. 21% of Americans listening to a podcast recently is great, but the other 79% of Americans are missing out on a ton of shows they would likely enjoy. Podcasting is essentially creating your own radio show in your basement, and it’s too damn amazing not to scale out to a larger audience.
- Whether through the efforts of Apple or another stakeholder, audience analytics on podcasts have to become easier to obtain. It’s great to talk about the purity of only hearing from listeners when they write a letter, but advertisers have limited budgets and podcasts are at a disadvantage compared to websites, online video, and even terrestrial radio — all of which have significantly more detailed analytics available to advertisers.
My hope is that as the podcast market matures — and we see later, TBD podcasts having even greater cultural moments than Serial— we’ll see more developments in these three spaces.
Here’s hoping.
Much like podcasters, Neal Ungerleider is writing this article for a large audience without getting paid. So why not pay $4.99 to buy a fancy coffee for the writer whose article you just read?
