How Big is the Global Podcast Economy?
Wondery founder Hernan Lopez has a new LinkedIn post interrogating the size of the global podcast economy. The IAB and PwC Internet Ad Revenue Report last week contained one page about podcasts. According to Lopez, who was part of a group of publishers that aided in the separate IAB podcast report that ran from 2016 to last year, the separate report was axed due to “lack of interest.” He pushes back with the notion that interest didn’t wane, the definition of podcast expanded beyond the confines of a report that only considers audio-on-demand “a podcast.” Podcasting’s stats end up cannibalized when podcasts on YouTube end up filed under digital video instead. While the IAB’s audio-only view still shows a growing industry (26% year over year revenue increase), Lopez seeks to start a broader conversation and invites those with specific insights to the global podcast economy to comment on his post or direct message via LinkedIn.
Google Isn’t Launching A User Choice Prompt For Third-Party Cookies In Chrome by Allison Schiff
I swear, this story has developed more twists and turns than a daytime soap opera in the past three years. As the headline says, the proposed update to Chrome that would require users to manually give third party cookies permission (similar to the Apple approach) has been axed. Effectively, the last six years of plans to sunset the current state of third-party cookies in Chrome have been wiped clean. Google still intends to invest in Privacy Sandbox APIs, and users can still enable existing privacy settings in Chrome. Schiff also proposes the possibility that locking down third party cookies, beyond the concerns of advertisers, has legal implications as evidenced by the 150 million euro fine Apple received over a competition authority in France finding their AppTrackingTransparency framework benefited Apple’s own interests while impacting their competitors.
YouTube’s cross-platform takeover is putting pressure on creators by Katie Hicks and Jennimai Nguyen
The growth of YouTube into both big and small screens in recent years, both with growing CTV presence and short-form content in Shorts, the strategy for YouTube creators has shifted. NowThis, which got its start with short-form content, was straddling the two worlds before Shorts came around. Now they’ve pivoted back to a heavier focus on bite-sized concepts as the costs of spinning up a new long-form show will always be more expensive. Meanwhile podcasting continues astronomic growth. Work x Work founder Scott Newman told Marketing Brew brands are continuing to diversify their channels, and video podcasts have been a big piece of that diversification. And with that support, video podcasts have become as much (if not more) of a living room viewing tradition as traditional TV talk shows.
As for the rest of the news…
- The PodGlomerate and AIR are hosting a free webinar titled What Audio Producers *Really* Need to Know About Video Podcasting on Zoom next Thursday, May 1st, at 2:00 p.m. EST.
- Flightpath has partnered with PodcastOne to support their growth strategy with real-time inventory forecasting, revenue insights, and data transparency across all sales channels.
- Barometer has chosen Speechmatics as their official speech technology partner, allowing Barometer to harness Speechmatic’s proprietary dataset trained on millions of hours of hand-transcribed text for accuracy across accents, dialects, and speaker demographics.
- PodcastOne has a slate of new weekly podcasts joining the network, including Vanderpump Rules cast member Tom Schwartz’ podcast Detox Retox.
