The Sounds Profitable Educational Series continues with a look at the News Podcast audience, in a live webinar featuring Tom Webster and Lamar Johnson, VP of Sponsorship Marketing at NPR’s sponsorship subsidiary National Public Media. This free event will be held on Wednesday, February 26th, at 2PM Eastern – register here today!
Where You Live, And What You Listen To by Tom Webster
Using zip code data provided by the over 5,000 respondents to The Podcast Landscape, Webster provides a graph of podcast genre popularity by region in the U.S. (the regions being West, South, Midwest, and Northeast). Comedy consistently scored well in the low to mid 30% range. Religious content scores highest in the South, along with healthy numbers for self-help content. Science remains relatively niche across the board. Gaming is slightly more popular in the West than Northeast. Though Webster does propose that regional stereotypes don’t necessarily provide reasons why people listen to which podcast genres.
Not Every Podcaster Is Ready for Video by Kaya Yurieff and Catherine Perloff
A look at the side of the industry not keeping pace with the productions that immediately embraced video podcasting. Multitude head of development Eric Silver says the industry pivoting to focus on video also pivots what the required core competency of podcasting, requiring the toolkit of a YouTuber more than a traditional audio podcaster. From the YouTuber side, Nick Witters (business partner of John “MrBallen” Allen) brings up the possibility of audience cannibalization if YouTubers bring their podcast content to other platforms. Spotify’s head of partnerships, Jordan Newman, says the company is seeing quite a few YouTubers coming over since their renewed investment in video podcasting (likely spurred on by their partnership with both older YouTube names like Rogan and Markiplier, as well as relatively newer success stories like Alex Cooper).
Media Briefing: Podcasters test different types of paywalls for subscriptions by Sara Guaglione
With the kick-off of On Air Fest during Bloomberg’s invite-only event on Wednesday, several podcasting executives discussed the variety of different monetization methods either currently in use or being piloted. Ben Cotton, svp and head of subscription growth at The New York Times, discussed partial paywalling methods like only making the most recent episodes available free, or in the case of Serial Productions only the most recent season (as well as early access to new episodes for paying members). Paywalls also need not be permanent, as Slow Burn host Leon Neyfakh highlighted the tactic of bringing paywalled content out on the free open RSS feed on occasion when fan-favorite exclusive episodes are particularly relevant to a current event or online trend.
Edison Research Top 25 Podcasts in the UK: Q4 2024 by Adam Bowie
The quarterly ranker from Edison Research covering the UK podcasting scene has published Q4 2024’s data and analyst Adam Bowie breaks it down with data from previous quarters for comparison. Notable observations include the health of News podcasts, including the re-entry of a few America-focused podcasts due to election interest. Only three of the UK top 25 also appear in Edison’s equivalent US charts (The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily, Crime Junkie) and are also the only three American podcasts in the top 25 period (with Call Her Daddy slipping off from last quarter).
As for the rest of the news…
- RainNews covers a new report from AdWizz titled The Rise of Programmatic Audio: An industry moving at the speed of sound.
- Linkfire has published their Q4 interrim financial report, including a 7% growth in revenue and 182% improved earnings.
- Realm has expanded their partnership with Adelicious to become the exclusive US sales partner for Adelicious’ podcast slate.
- On the heels of SiriusXM officially announcing a partnership with Supporting Cast to distribute premium podcast feeds, The Hollywood Reporter covers the story along with pricing and podcasts involved
