I run a small podcast startup. I've been doing it ten years.
Podcasting is drying up because the money left. Everyone went all in on podcasts on 2020. Spotify bet the farm on podcasts. Money poured in. Marketing bros realized there's only so many mattresses and underwear you can sell through the format and left.
You really can't serve personalized ads through podcasts. The relevance of what you advertise can be about the topic of the show (that is, marketing to the type of people who would listen) or the location of the listener. Pretty much every other signal gives you nothing interesting you'd be about to decide "yeah they're a potential good customer". Spray and pray.
The money left. People realized they couldn't justify the time and money they pour into podcasting. It turns out, even if you weren't expecting to make money, you really hoped people would listen. Not enough, because podcasts faded and people discovered TikTok. No more waiting for your favorite show to drop: everything is your favorite show. If you get bored just scroll up.
Lots of folks are still making it work. But a lot more people are going into podcasting with a more deliberate approach. People are doing it because they think it's important, not because they think people will listen or because they want to get rich. I'd argue that some of the best podcasts ever made have come out in the past 2-3 years, but if you're not giving the median listener the thrill of the first season of Serial, they don't listen past the first episode or two.
I’ve got a novel idea of how podcasters can make money - give people a product they are willing to pay for.
I pay for the Strategery bundle (as do enough other people to make him over $5 million a year), a Slate subscription with all of their related podcasts and a couple of others - Downstream and ATP.
On the ad supported side, Gruber’s podcast has been going strong for decades and Manager Tools/Career Tools only has ads for its own conferences and it’s been podcasting weekly since 2005.
The Acquired podcast negotiates long term sponsorship deals.
Relay.FM podcasts seem to be going strong between ads and paid members
The trend you see is that it’s better to be a niche podcaster and have “1000 true fans” and an audience either willing to pay or one that advertisers want to reach - like Apple customers who are more willing to pay for stuff.
We should reset the podcasting world because the top podcast lists are full of topical stuff someone doesn't care about? A top podcast list full of fluff means that we've run out of things to say, seriously?
I have the exact opposite problem with podcasts that the author details: I have too many that I want to listen to and not enough time. There are so many people whose opinions and perspectives I value that I will never be able to consume them all consistently. From deep dives into Roman history, miniseries on foreign policy, sports, politics, film music, there are so many people sharing their passion with the world and I want to hear it all.
But finding those people takes work. Yeah, there are a ton of losers out there with nothing to say who put out popular content, but that's not unique to podcasting. YouTube, Reddit, hell the entire internet has that problem.
Stuff like this reads to me like someone wants the internet to be happy fun time that only ever gives me an endless supply of good things to consume and filters out all the bad.
Would it be like returning to that time when all of the podcast people were trying to tell me about the same quirky thing and I had to decide between letting them down or pretending I hadn't already heard it from the other podcast people?
Maybe the content was better in those days, but as an outsider I'm not too keen on going back. I prefer my friends as separate people.
I subscribe to exactly zero podcasts. It's not a position or a statement; I just don't find them interesting enough to win out over audiobooks or music.
Thanks to the Libby app, I have "read" several thousand books over the past 7-8 years. An excellent pair of earbuds is mandatory to allow a 2x listening speed, which you can work up to in about a week.
Everyone tells me that they "don't have time" to listen to 2-3 books a week. I listen when I'm doing my morning routine, when I'm cooking, when I'm cleaning, when I'm cycling, when I'm shopping, when I'm clearing snow.
Listening to influencers and celebrities hang out, pretend to be friends and try to be funny just doesn't do it for me.
The whole scene is rapidly being pushed to walled gardens too not published to an RSS feed for the client of your choice. I assume because most Podcasts are now a video affair.
It seems just about every celebrity has started producing one based on the new golden globe award the other day.
> You'll find thousands of shows with perfect audio quality and professional-grade cover art that contain absolutely zero intellectual nutritional value
This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).
Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).
Podcasting started mostly due to curiosity. People used to discuss topics that were interesting enough to warrant investment into the needed hardware and labouring the entire setup and production. If the topics weren't as interesting, the people were. That is how Joe Rogan begun and built his brand, after all. There was quite a lot of "whoah" factor back in the early days.
I do not think this has gone away. Yes, market saturation waters everything down to the common denominator. Podcasting is no different than any other commercial or public market. But there will be always outliers. The only difference is that back in the old days(early 2000s and 2010s), your choices were limited, which made it easier to pick. Today, you have to invest time and effort and hunt down those good podcasts that match your interests by sifting through a ton of the noise(badam, tssss).
I was big into podcasts, even started my own. Until I realised that without interesting guests to bring in week after week, there is no point in it.
But I think that the main issue is, and has been for a very ling time, that there is really not a single good user interface for consuming podcasts, especially offline, managing podcasts or discovering new ones, keeping tabs on what is going on with individual shows or even getting recommendations on and being able to purchase your own podcasting kit, so that you don't have to research and learn about audio, video and other related things that might detract someone from thinking about starting their own podcast. And also all of this in packaging suitable for different consumption situations - walking, driving a car, riding a bus, being at work or at home. Yes, there were many various apps and websites, but they all suck and lack in any useful feature. They essentially just aggregate podcasts and offer RSS feeds. That's kindergarten bs.
The only podcasts I still listen to are the ones I've been listening to since the 0's when I had to download .mp3 files and put them on my USB key MP3 player
100% amateur stuff, no ad, nothing to sell, just humans having fun in front of a mic
----
The recent reboot of the medium is more akin to the talk shows from TV, but instead of trying to reach a wide range of audience, podcasts are targeting niches.
Which allow more podcasts to exist... but make it harder to be sustainable since their goal is mostly to make money
I sometimes listen to podcasts, close to none of them were discovered inside a podcast app, and the one that were, it was because an author of a podcast I was already listening started a separate one. I used to think that podcast had a discoveribility issue, but I'm honestly not that sure anymore. I don't usually get new books/ebooks suggested by my phone either, and after all, a podcast and an ebook have more things in common than different from each other. I trust word of mouth over algorithm to give me good reading suggestion, and off course I do the same with ebook (in the more sporadic occasion when I want to use ears rather than eyes), maybe it's just unreasonable to expect podcast to act differently.
The discovery layer is what’s fundamentally broken, not podcasting itself. I bet there are many great podcasts out there very few people listens to just because you can’t get to them unless someone shares it. I can’t believe from millions of podcasts 195 out of the top 200 in the history category all suck.
I fully agree and fully disagree with this. Podcasting is radio without the constraints of frequency.
That’s both good and bad. Radio was a magical medium to me, but it was utterly destroyed first by the attack of the conservatives and then by the consolidation by Clear Channel, etc, and finally by internet imploding ad models. So you have angry white guys and the annoying, high quality NPR content.
But I think it’s different. Spotify wants to be Clear Channel, but as long as Apple and others have a benign disinterest, there’s unlimited content available. I listen to my old geek podcasts, but there is a tremendous well of quality content in many areas. From history to finance mostly for me.
I have listened to podcasts for over 20 years now and COVID ruined them. Ads became unbearable and media corporations flooded the zone with repacked TV and radio programs. These companies dint know that podcasting is a different thing.
My contribution to help fix this is earsay.fm. It’s an iOS podcast client with 100% in device ad detection and skipping.
As occasional podcast producer I can say, that podcasts are not interesting medium for me. Text based mediums are much more efficient to give knowledge and new thoughts. At least for me.
17 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadPodcasting is drying up because the money left. Everyone went all in on podcasts on 2020. Spotify bet the farm on podcasts. Money poured in. Marketing bros realized there's only so many mattresses and underwear you can sell through the format and left.
You really can't serve personalized ads through podcasts. The relevance of what you advertise can be about the topic of the show (that is, marketing to the type of people who would listen) or the location of the listener. Pretty much every other signal gives you nothing interesting you'd be about to decide "yeah they're a potential good customer". Spray and pray.
The money left. People realized they couldn't justify the time and money they pour into podcasting. It turns out, even if you weren't expecting to make money, you really hoped people would listen. Not enough, because podcasts faded and people discovered TikTok. No more waiting for your favorite show to drop: everything is your favorite show. If you get bored just scroll up.
Lots of folks are still making it work. But a lot more people are going into podcasting with a more deliberate approach. People are doing it because they think it's important, not because they think people will listen or because they want to get rich. I'd argue that some of the best podcasts ever made have come out in the past 2-3 years, but if you're not giving the median listener the thrill of the first season of Serial, they don't listen past the first episode or two.
I pay for the Strategery bundle (as do enough other people to make him over $5 million a year), a Slate subscription with all of their related podcasts and a couple of others - Downstream and ATP.
On the ad supported side, Gruber’s podcast has been going strong for decades and Manager Tools/Career Tools only has ads for its own conferences and it’s been podcasting weekly since 2005.
The Acquired podcast negotiates long term sponsorship deals.
Relay.FM podcasts seem to be going strong between ads and paid members
The trend you see is that it’s better to be a niche podcaster and have “1000 true fans” and an audience either willing to pay or one that advertisers want to reach - like Apple customers who are more willing to pay for stuff.
I have the exact opposite problem with podcasts that the author details: I have too many that I want to listen to and not enough time. There are so many people whose opinions and perspectives I value that I will never be able to consume them all consistently. From deep dives into Roman history, miniseries on foreign policy, sports, politics, film music, there are so many people sharing their passion with the world and I want to hear it all.
But finding those people takes work. Yeah, there are a ton of losers out there with nothing to say who put out popular content, but that's not unique to podcasting. YouTube, Reddit, hell the entire internet has that problem.
Stuff like this reads to me like someone wants the internet to be happy fun time that only ever gives me an endless supply of good things to consume and filters out all the bad.
Maybe the content was better in those days, but as an outsider I'm not too keen on going back. I prefer my friends as separate people.
Thanks to the Libby app, I have "read" several thousand books over the past 7-8 years. An excellent pair of earbuds is mandatory to allow a 2x listening speed, which you can work up to in about a week.
Everyone tells me that they "don't have time" to listen to 2-3 books a week. I listen when I'm doing my morning routine, when I'm cooking, when I'm cleaning, when I'm cycling, when I'm shopping, when I'm clearing snow.
Listening to influencers and celebrities hang out, pretend to be friends and try to be funny just doesn't do it for me.
It seems just about every celebrity has started producing one based on the new golden globe award the other day.
This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).
Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).
I do not think this has gone away. Yes, market saturation waters everything down to the common denominator. Podcasting is no different than any other commercial or public market. But there will be always outliers. The only difference is that back in the old days(early 2000s and 2010s), your choices were limited, which made it easier to pick. Today, you have to invest time and effort and hunt down those good podcasts that match your interests by sifting through a ton of the noise(badam, tssss).
I was big into podcasts, even started my own. Until I realised that without interesting guests to bring in week after week, there is no point in it.
But I think that the main issue is, and has been for a very ling time, that there is really not a single good user interface for consuming podcasts, especially offline, managing podcasts or discovering new ones, keeping tabs on what is going on with individual shows or even getting recommendations on and being able to purchase your own podcasting kit, so that you don't have to research and learn about audio, video and other related things that might detract someone from thinking about starting their own podcast. And also all of this in packaging suitable for different consumption situations - walking, driving a car, riding a bus, being at work or at home. Yes, there were many various apps and websites, but they all suck and lack in any useful feature. They essentially just aggregate podcasts and offer RSS feeds. That's kindergarten bs.
There's your $1B idea.
100% amateur stuff, no ad, nothing to sell, just humans having fun in front of a mic
----
The recent reboot of the medium is more akin to the talk shows from TV, but instead of trying to reach a wide range of audience, podcasts are targeting niches.
Which allow more podcasts to exist... but make it harder to be sustainable since their goal is mostly to make money
So I listen to one totally unserious podcast, and ignore the rest. Makes my day.
Why does abandon podcast clog up your feed, and a blog does not?
That’s both good and bad. Radio was a magical medium to me, but it was utterly destroyed first by the attack of the conservatives and then by the consolidation by Clear Channel, etc, and finally by internet imploding ad models. So you have angry white guys and the annoying, high quality NPR content.
But I think it’s different. Spotify wants to be Clear Channel, but as long as Apple and others have a benign disinterest, there’s unlimited content available. I listen to my old geek podcasts, but there is a tremendous well of quality content in many areas. From history to finance mostly for me.
The radio style content is mostly crap.
My contribution to help fix this is earsay.fm. It’s an iOS podcast client with 100% in device ad detection and skipping.