How podcasts are changing the way we consume audio content
Gosh, there are a lot of podcasts, aren’t there? So how does anyone make money from them? Let’s take a Deep Dive.
💡 Advertising, sponsorship, subscription fees, direct sales: there are lots of ways of making money from a podcast.
💵❌ However, most podcasts don’t make any.
🌊 That’s largely because the market is saturated.
😕 The result is a rather paradoxical market with the number of podcasts shrinking while audience figures continue to grow.
QUOTABLE
“The medium of podcasting and the personal nature of it, the relationship you build with your listeners and the relationship they have with you—there’s nothing like that.”
― Marc Maron, podcaster, comedian and actor
BY THE NUMBERS
1,000 The minimum threshold for advertisers to be interested in a podcast is generally 1,000 regular downloads.
$10 The typical cost of reaching 1,000 podcast listeners as an advertiser runs between $10 and $30, averaging $22.24.
80% The number of podcasts launched in 2022 was 219,000, 80 percent down from the 729,000 launched in 2021.
$19 billion The global podcasting market was worth $19 billion in 2022—a number that is predicted to grow to $224.3 billion by 2032.
QUIZ
How many podcast listeners are there globally?
A. 264.7 million
B. 364.7 million
C. 464.7 million
Scroll to the bottom for the answer.
DID YOU KNOW?
Last year represented the first time since 2013 that the percentage of Americans listening to podcasts fell from 41 percent to 38 percent.
THE EDIT
😣 Good luck with that. Established shows dominate lists of the most popular podcasts, to the extent that it’s almost impossible to create new hits.
💰 Maybe we should’ve thought of that earlier? As a result of putting $1 billion into podcasts and struggling to make any money from them, Spotify is moving towards a YouTube-like advertising model.
📣 No logo. The secret to financial podcast success could be to diversify away from advertising as a source of revenue.
🤨 Not listening. Download stats are the metric used to sell ads on podcasts, but you can download a podcast without ever listening to it, so advertisers are often sceptical about its value.
🏆Award-winners. Like the Oscars, podcasts have their own awards that recognise podcasting excellence. Tatler Gen.T's Crazy Smart Asia clinched the Best Podcast at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Asia in 2022.
LISTEN
Was 2022 the year that podcasts died? Find out—in a podcast.
KEY PLAYER
Daniel Ek
The co-founder and CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek is responsible for the single biggest jolt to the economics of podcasting when his company decided in 2019 to invest $1 billion in the medium. Stung by the difficulty of making money, he has subsequently rowed back somewhat on that largesse.
HONOUREE TO KNOW
Juliana Chan
When Juliana Chan's passion for science grew too wide-ranging for her life in academia, she launched Wildtype Media Group in 2012. She eventually realised that science communication was her true calling and left her post as an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University to work full‑time on her media business which publishes Asian Scientist Magazine.
ONE FINAL THING
Surprisingly, The Illusion of Independent Radio isn’t the name of an indie rock band. Instead, it was podcasting’s unexpected antecedent, an underground spoken word journalistic project started in Russia in 1989.
