Amazon Auto’s Potential, True Crime Podcast Audiences, & More

This Week in the Business of Podcasting

It’s getting chilly outside, which means it’s time to make some chili. Before I start cracking open cans of beans and dealing with the emails I’ll get about putting beans in chili, it’s time to take a look back at news from the business of podcasting this week.

Transparency. Performance. Automation.

A Look at the Landscape of True Crime Podcast Listeners

This Wednesday Tom Webster debuted a new report titled The True Crime Podcast Consumer, sponsored by Libsyn. The new study is built from The Podcast Landscape’s 5,071 respondents of U.S. residents aged 18+.

Several of the key findings in the True Crime Podcast Consumer challenge widely-held presumptions about brand suitability, listener demographics, and True Crime audiences’ feelings about advertising and branded content.

When asked to list which podcast genres they had consumed in the past thirty days, 16% of Americans 18+ have consumed a True Crime podcast within that time frame, approximately 42 million people. True Crime podcast audiences skew younger than the U.S. population overall, with only 22% of the audience being 55+. The genre is incredibly popular with women, with 56% of respondents who consume True Crime being female. It also boasts a diverse audience, over-indexing with Hispanic/Latino and Black audiences.

Respondents who consume True Crime are extremely receptive to brands, both as advertisers and producers of podcast content. 46% of True Crime podcast consumers answered “more likely” to the question “does a company’s involvement make you more or less likely to try a new podcast?” A 12% more favorable response than non True Crime consumers.

Online Car Shopping and What That Could Mean for Podcasting

This Monday, Andrew J. Hawkins writing for The Verge covered a new way to buy cars in the U.S. Starting this week, auto buyers in 48 U.S. cities can browse the inventory of select Hyundai dealerships through the new site Amazon Auto. Previously, customers could browse cars and compare prices on Amazon but the actual purchase process had to be completed with a dealership.

Now Amazon Auto solves for that, allowing customers to order, finance, and arrange delivery of a vehicle entirely within an Amazon ecosystem. Currently the only brand available is Hyundai but that could change in future. Consumers tend to dislike the current dealership system for car buying. A growing direct-to-consumer movement has been gaining traction off the efforts of Tesla, but Amazon Auto finds middle ground by allowing dealerships to exist, gets their inventory access to more customers at once, and makes the buying process much more relaxed.

While interesting in its own right, from a podcasting perspective one only has to look at Amazon’s current system to see potential for something big. Amazon’s DSP integration with podcast host Art19 would be a natural fit to lean into direct-to-consumer car ads being deployed in Art19 podcasts. Podcasts have moved countless mattresses over the years, imagine the affiliate rate or commission on shifting a car.

Survey of New Zealand Podcasts Finds Gaps in Industry Knowledge

Researcher Lewis Tennant recently published An extensive survey and history of podcasting in New Zealand, an academic study charting the history of New Zealand’s podcasting scene from 2005 onward, including 722 NZ podcasts and a broad examination of podcasting’s growth overall. While home-grown podcasts took some time to get off the ground, averaging single-digit new shows per year until 2014, the industry swelled until the COVID boom of 2020 when 154 new Kiwi-produced podcasts were launched.

While charting the history of NZ podcasting, Tennant found some roadblocks to research that the wider world of podcasting should take note of. A quote from Tennant in the study’s abstract:

“Undertaking this research project revealed inconsistencies with podcast terminology and issues with conventional podcast categories. There is no ubiquitous list of podcast formats, and accompanying definitions of each. When discussing podcasts, genre and topic are often used interchangeably.”

With the maturation of podcasting as a medium comes the importance of academic documentation and establishing industry knowledge. While there are beginner attempts to establish and define a more standardized podcast lexicon (such as the Podcast Industry Glossary), if a researcher doesn’t inherently know where to look for such resources, they’re at the mercy of increasingly muddy search engine results.

Easily-accessible educational resources, as well as simple encyclopedic cataloging of information, can serve a dual purpose of helping up-and-coming podcast professionals and enabling those looking to study or write about podcasting the ability to understand industry jargon, processes, and history without having lived it firsthand.

Video Podcasting on YouTube Hits Milestone, Grows in Accessibility [Multiple Sources]

This Wednesday David Pierce, writing for The Verge, covered a recent YouTube earnings call. A recurring theme of the call was YouTube’s growth on connected televisions, becoming a living room mainstay for viewers. Sports content watch-time on TVs through YouTube increased 30% year over year.

Similar growth on TVs continues for podcasting, with the platform passing 400 million monthly video podcast watch-hours. As coverage quoted in Digital Music News puts it, users have been turning into podcasts similarly to how TV users regularly tune into late-night talk shows.

On the YouTube video podcasting front, that content is about to be more accessible worldwide as Google Deepmind has upgraded Google Translate and a YouTube implementation is being rolled out in the form of an auto-dubbing feature. The feature will detect the language of a video, supporting English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, or Portuguese. Once the system detects what language is spoken in the video, it’ll generate dub tracks in the other eight languages. Creators will have the ability to review the dubs before they’re published to ensure they’re happy with the results. Published auto-dubs will have a label applied to the video while that audio track is used to denote the viewer is hearing a generated track. The player will also remember language choice and default to it for future videos.