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The Creators

The Creators

Sounds Profitable, in partnership with Edison Research, has put together the first credible study of the profile of podcast creators in America. This is an incredibly important benchmark in the...

By Tom Webster

June 28, 2022

Sponsored by

Sounds Profitable, in partnership with Edison Research, has put together the first credible study of the profile of podcast creators in America. This is an incredibly important benchmark in the history of podcasting and the first of many regular reports Sounds Profitable will be publishing to chart the future of the audio business.

This report looks at the characteristics and behaviors of the persons creating podcasts in America and includes demographic information as well as behavioral data, content preferences, and attitudes about monetization and advertising.

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Sponsors

Sounds Profitable thanks the following sponsors for their support of this project:

Ad Results Media · Market Enginuity · Podbean · Podcast Movement · Podnews · PRX · Red Circle · Simplecast · Spreaker, from iHeart

Read the transcript

TOM WEBSTER: Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to The Creators, the very first research project from all of us here at Sounds Profitable. I’m Tom Webster, partner at Sounds Profitable. And I’ve been with Sounds Profitable a month, and I am super proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in that period of time.

Today’s study is going to take a look at the people making the content that we all know and love, the people behind the podcasts. And I have to tell you, it’s one of the questions that I get asked the most frequently, and have for years, by journalists, by VC people, investors. They want to know who’s actually making the podcasts. Who’s making the sausage behind what we all listen to?

And to date, it’s not been a question that’s been tackled in a really scientific way. It’s a difficult research question. If you were to stop 1,000 people in the street, for instance, and ask them, hey, do you make a podcast, you might get three or four people to say yes. You might get punched 10 times. I don’t want that for you.

So it’s been a difficult research question to ask. But we’ve been able to tackle it, and I’m super proud of that. And this is going to be really the first in what I hope will be years and years to come of research studies that Sounds Profitable puts out to make the podcast industry bigger and better and make a career for all of us.

Before I get started with actually going through the research, I want to take a moment to talk about our sponsors. And I want you to think about this a little bit differently. I’ve certainly done a lot of research projects in the past that have been sponsored by a company, sponsored by a couple of companies. And those research projects, by the way, they’re not biased, but the fact that a company wants to investigate a particular topic is certainly because they’re interested in that particular topic.

One of our missions here at Sounds Profitable is to make the space bigger and better for everyone. And sometimes that means asking the questions that maybe aren’t of particular interest to one company or another but are important to the industry. And that’s what we’ve been able to do, and that’s what we’ve been able to do with the help of our sponsors.

Our sponsors are more than just a logo on a page. They’re supporting our mission. And our mission is to make this space bigger and better and provide a career and a life for all of us that are so passionate about it. And I want this to be a viable career for everybody listening to me, for an economy to spring up. And for that to happen, we have to ask these kinds of questions and answer these kinds of questions.

So I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors who are supporting our mission and bringing you this research. I want to thank our hosting and monetization partners RedCircle, Spreaker from iHeart, Podbean, and Simplecast. I want to thank our advertising and agency partners at Ad Results Media and Market Enginuity. The folks at PRX, the home to so many creators, and our media partners at Podnews and Podcast Movement. And we’ll have more to say about all of that a little bit later on.

Now, as I mentioned, this has been a difficult research challenge because, if you were to stop 1,000 people, not too many of them would-be creators. Maybe here in Boston, where I am, you’d get a higher percentage. But it’s a tough dial, as we say, in the research industry. So in order to tackle this problem really from a credible and projectable methodology, we enlisted the aids of our partners at Edison Research. And what we were able to do for the creators was essentially piggyback onto Edison Podcast Metrics.

Edison Podcast Metrics is an ongoing research study. In fact, it’s sampled every single day of weekly podcast consumers, currently 8,000 podcast consumers per year—that is now going up to 20,000 podcast consumers per year—where they’re constantly asking questions about which podcasts people are listening to, some of their demographic information, behavioral information. And we added a question to that particular survey about a year ago, which is simply this: Do you currently or have you ever produced a podcast? And that could be at any level of producing a podcast. That could be as a host. That could be in production. That could be booking guests. That could be sound design.

But essentially, here, our sample is composed of weekly podcast listeners that are drawn from that. The weekly podcast sample from Edison Podcast Metrics, again, as I mentioned, it’s a significant sample. It’s weighted and balanced to the latest Infinite Dial information, so it is representative of the online population of the United States, 18+.

And again, we collected this data throughout the course of the last year, and we were able to aggregate over 600 podcast creators. That is certainly enough to be able to talk about them in total. This is a study that we want to continue every single year. And, good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise and sponsors coming on board with us, we will continue to do that and grow this study. And hopefully be able to get into more deep dives and drill into the demographics of creators a little bit more.

But this really is the first credible study, credible look, at who is creating podcasts in America, and I can’t wait to talk about it.

And we’re really going to start with a bang with, I think, one of the most significant findings of this particular study. And that is to look at the demographic from a gender perspective of creators. On the left, you’ll see the US population 18+. It’s about 50-50 male-female. On the right, these are the creators.

And really, what this graph looks like is what the audience used to look like back in the earliest days of podcasting, back when I first started researching podcasting in 2005–2006 as a very young boy. The podcast audience looked a lot like this. It was about 2/3 male, about 1/3 female. And what we’re seeing here with the creators is that they are, in fac,t overwhelmingly male. And this is something that I’m going to have a word to say about at the end of this project and certainly at the end of this webinar.

But it’s something to note that, when we talk about the creator space, we are still talking about a space that is overrepresented male. And that’s something to think about, not just in terms of your own creation, but also in growing the space. Because don’t forget-- every creator is also a podcast listener. So that’s really the first major finding here, is that when we talk about creators, we are talking about a universe that is nearly 70% male. And I can tell you, of all of the women that I’ve talked to about these data and this finding, I got a lot of knowing nods. So let’s park that for a moment.

The other interesting finding here from a demographic standpoint is that, amongst creators, those aged 45 and up, they’re barely there. And in fact, 55 and up, 2% of creators are 55+. 12% of creators are 45 to 54. You put those together, 14% of the creator audience is older than 44. And if you compare that to the US population on the left, you’ll see it is a significant slant to the creator universe.

One of the things that I’ve been talking about for a few months now has been, really, the content opportunities available to reach older Americans. And by older here, I’m really talking about 55+, which is not that old if you read up on your medical journals. And one of the reasons why I think that this audience has lagged behind a little bit in podcasting may be because content creation amongst that audience has also lagged behind. So that’s another, I think, significant finding from the creators, but there is some good news to all of this.

I mentioned a few months ago that I think that the audience certainly has the opportunity and likely will trend to be much more diverse in terms of ethnicity than even the US population. And we do, in fact, see that with creators. And what we’re seeing here, again, the US population on the left, 63% white, and the creator population on the right, 51% white. What we are seeing on this graph is something that we have seen repeatedly, certainly the last couple of US/Latino podcast listener studies that Edison Research has put out.

The Latino audience for podcast listeners, and clearly for creators, is growing significantly. So that part is really good news. The creator space is attracting a great deal of diversity from that standpoint, and that’s leading to the diversity of the audience. And that diversity in audience certainly is something that I’ve reported on for the past several years, and it’s really encouraging to see here.

Now, in terms of education, I want you to think about these data in terms of the kind of filter bubbles that we all swim in. If you’re like me, you get a lot of information on social media. You get a lot of information on things like Twitter from people that you follow, from other podcasters. And what this graph shows you is that the podcast creators, the people making the podcasts that we all listen to, don’t look like the average American. They don’t look like the average American in terms of education. If you look on the left—and that, again, is census data for the most recent census—you add the advanced degree and some graduate credits. About 10% of Americans have at least some graduate education, some graduate credits, if not a degree.

Compare that to the creators. 40% of creators have an advanced degree. Now, that’s not a bad thing, but it does speak to ideological and mindset differences between the average creator—and maybe you know some exceptions, I certainly do—and the average American. And all of those things add up to how we process the content that’s being created and how the creators themselves are selecting the content that they’re choosing to pursue.

So that’s one aspect, I think, of that filter bubble that we may see in terms of the creators and the people that we talk to every day that are making podcasts. And that, of course, creates a lot of trailing variables. Higher levels of education lead to higher levels of employment. They lead to higher income. You can guess where this is going.

The US population, in terms of employment, it’s about 51%, 52% are full-time employees. With the creators, that’s more like 73%. And you add on another 7% employedpart-timee. 80% of creators are currently employed. And so for many of these creators, the podcasts that they’re working on are not their full-time job. They have a full-time job. They’re creating those podcasts in their spare time. And I don’t know about you. I don’t have a lot of spare time, but these are folks that are clearly passionate about the space, passionate about creating content.

And one of the things that that leads to, of course, having that kind of full-time employment, having that kind of education, are higher degrees of income. And you really notice this in the household income figures, $100,000 or more. If you look on the left, again, the US population, 12% $100,000 to $149,999, to be precise, and then another 10%, $150,000 or more. So that’s 20%, really, 22%, of the US population with a household income of greater than $100,000. But with podcast creators, that’s 38%.

Now again, your mileage may vary, but I’m talking about statistics here that have never been collected, never in a credible, projectable fashion. So if some of these things challenge your received wisdom, if they challenge your assumptions, that’s good. It’s step one, I think, of all of us breaking out of our filter bubbles and understanding the creator space and how that influences the audience space.

Now, with those levels of education and that level of employment, we get stats like this, the percentage of podcast creators that either work mostly from home or at least work equally inside the home and outside the home. And what this says to me, with 46% of creators working mostly from their homes—by the way, many of them own their own business—and 17% working inside and outside equally, is that creators, at least the majority of them, belong to a kind of information worker class that has been able to work at home throughout the pandemic, has been able really to continue to work from home, as I do here. So that is a class of society. That is a strata of society. Again, to recap here, more likely to have attained higher degrees of education, more likely to be employed, higher household income, and more likely to be able to work from home, to have the kind of job that allows them to work from home, and, dare I suggest, the kind of job that allows them the freedom and the flexibility to make podcasts in their spare time, where perhaps others in other economic strata of the United States are not able to. And that’s, again, something I want you to park in the back of your mind as we go through these data.

One thing about these creators, again, highly educated, highly employed, also very likely to drive workplace purchases. And again, I mentioned a sizable percentage actually own their own business or are entrepreneurs. But of those that are employed, either part-time or full-time, 80% say they at least participate in purchase decisions at work. That’s a very high number in terms of decision-makers and financial decision makers. And of that 80%, 86% say that the ultimate responsibility for those purchases lies with them. So the creator class, again, it’s really part of the upper levels in terms of economic strata of this country. They have a lot of disposable income, they have free time and flexibility to create content, and they drive purchase decisions and financial responsibility for their companies.

So all of this is to say that the creator class in America right now—and again, I know you know exceptions, your mileage may vary, but I’m talking about averages here—he creator class in America, many of them are economically privileged, are economically advantaged. And think about how that plays into the content, again, that is being created, the content certainly that is often at the top of the charts when we look at things like the Apple Podcast charts and other measures of podcasts. Where that’s all coming from, that’s coming from the human beings that make them. They’re certainly the human beings that began as creators in the podcast industry.

Where we have been may or may not be reflective of where we’re going, but certainly indicative of a bit of a filter bubble, I think, if all we talk to our current creators of podcasts. I show this, a) because I’m interested in politics. Today is a major primary day for many of you across the country. But I show this really to highlight what I’m talking about here, how there is absolutely an ideological and demographic slant to the current batch of creators that we have. 57% of creators identify as Democrats. When it comes to political matters, how do you usually think of yourselves? 57% identify as Democrats, 17% Republicans, and another 18% Independent. That differs dramatically from the most recent polling that I’ve seen from multiple sources.

Certainly, the most recent Gallup polling I’ve seen on this is that the plurality of Americans identify as Independents. Over 40% of Americans identify as Independent. Democrats are typically close to 30%, and Republicans are typically in the low 20s. So this is very different from the US population and I think indicative, again, of a strata of society that has been perhaps more enabled, more empowered, perhaps more interested in creating content.

But all of it plays a role in the current body of creators and the current body of content that is out there. One thing about creators, though, they’re much more likely to have kids and kids at home. Of those who are creators, who are a parent or guardian of a child under 18—that’s about 61% of creators, by the way. That’s higher than the US population by a fair amount. 2/3 of those parents say that their children also listen to podcasts.

So when we empower a creator, when we make a creator, we are creating one listener, at least, in terms of that creator. We may be creating future generations of listeners as it pertains to their children. They may be passing on their love of podcasting to their kids.

One thing, again, about creators, and this is probably no surprise to you, creators are extremely active on social media, certainly extremely active, I would guess, promoting their content, promoting their podcasts on social media. And these numbers—and I’ll show you the US population figures here in just a moment—are all extraordinarily high. 94% of creators use YouTube. 88% of creators use Instagram and Facebook. And the one that I’ll ask you to remember here is actually Twitter. 78% of the people who say that they are at some aspect involved with the creation of podcasts say that they’re on Twitter. That’s 78% of creators. If you look at the US population, that’s much lower. That’s 27%. So creators are almost three times as likely to be active on Twitter as the US population. And again, that really speaks to that kind of filter bubble that I talked about before. If all that we are learning about the podcast audience and podcast creators is coming through Twitter, it’s coming through rose-colored glasses to some extent.

But all of these figures are much lower than with creators_Facebook at 63%. If you recall, creators was 88%. So was Instagram and so on. So they’re very active on social media, and that, I think, influences the received wisdom that we get about the creation space and the creator space. But there’s good news behind that, as well. These creators are extremely active on social media and not just about their own stuff and promoting their own content. 84% say that they have shared a podcast on social media. 86% have followed a podcast host, and 87% have followed a podcast on social media. So these are important ambassadors to the space.

Again, every creator is also a listener. Every creator is a potential ambassador to the space. This is, I think, again, a trailing variable of the economic buying power of creators. Many creators own both iPhone and Android devices. It’s inevitable, with 71% of creators saying they have at least one iPhone device and another 71% saying they have at least one Android device. Then the overlap of that, certainly a healthy percentage of Americans have an additional device from the other operating system.

Again, that’s a trailing variable of household income, which, again, is a trailing variable in this country of education. The iPhone percentage here at 71%, significantly higher than the market share of iPhones in the United States, which, though it has been growing, is really closer to 50% than 71%. I’ve certainly done a lot of research in the past on smart speakers and smart audio, and creators are very active users of smart audio, if only to make sure that their own podcast works and sounds great on your Alexa or Google devices.

65% of the creators say that they ever listen to podcasts on smart speakers. That’s compared to 36% of podcast listeners, in general, so getting close to twice as likely to do that. And again, that may be purely to hear their own content. It may be to hear the content of others. But when we hear about smart speakers and hear about content creators using smart speakers, know that they are onto this almost twice as much as the average weekly podcast listener is.

And by the way, the average weekly podcast listener is much more likely to own and use a smart speaker than the US population, in general. Now, here’s some data that I’ve certainly seen and certainly presented myself before. What are the services most often used by podcast listeners to consume podcasts? Now, in the data that I’ve certainly presented before when I was with Edison and that I’ve seen before, this order is not surprising to me.

This order is something that I’ve certainly been seeing for months, certainly saw it for several quarters when I was at Edison looking at Edison Podcast Metrics. So the order here is not surprising to me, but what is different is the gap between first and third. Those figures are much closer with podcast listeners, in general. And what I would posit here is that for Spotify, in particular, Spotify is providing creator tools. And again, many of these creators, it actually might be their real entrance into the podcast space, period, even as a listener, might be the fact that they’re creating their own content.

So I think establishing tools for creators to create content also grows a listener. And I think that’s something that we see here, not so much in the order of these three but certainly in the size of the gap between number one and number three here. And I think, again, that comes down to tools being provided for creators.

One of the questions that is asked of all podcast listeners in Edison Podcast Metrics is, what are the topics that you’d like to listen to? And obviously, you can select more than one here. And I show this to you because in a moment, I’m going to show you how this compares to weekly podcast listeners, in general.

But these are the topics that creators, this class of human that I have just described to you that is more likely to be male, more likely to be under the age of 44, affluent, well-educated-- they’re very interested, certainly, in comedy. Comedy is number one with everybody, but there are certain things that over-index with podcast creators compared to weekly podcast listeners, in general.

Podcast creators, they’re very passionate about technology. Most of the early podcasts-- early, early-- were about podcasts and about podcasting. And I certainly still listen to a number of those myself, but the space has grown beyond there. But creators are more interested in things like technology, science, fiction, audio fiction, audio drama, history. I’ll show you page two here. And again, some of these things are roughly in the same order that they are with the podcast listening audience, in general, but some things really over-index, and some things really under-index.

And the best way to look at that really is a comparison between the top 10 with creators and the most recent genre ranker from Edison Podcast Metrics. And as I mentioned, comedy is really number one with everybody. But the interesting things that you’ll see here with the creators, topics like technology, history, science, perhaps highbrow topics, over-index compared to the weekly podcast audience. The weekly podcast audience, in general, they’re more likely to be passionate, or they index higher, I should say, for things like Society and Culture and True Crime.

True Crime is noticeably higher with the weekly podcast audience, in general, compared to podcast creators. So all of that, again, it’s important to understand the strata, the societal, ideological, and economic strata, of the average creator-- maybe not every creator, but the average creator in this country and how they differ from the weekly podcast listener, in general.

Now, one thing about creators is that they’re not overwhelmingly heavier listeners to podcasts than the average weekly podcast consumer. In Edison Podcast Metrics, the most recent data that I looked at, weekly listeners to podcasts listen to about 7 and 1/2 hours of podcasts per week in that study. With creators, it’s 8 hours and 18 minutes, not significantly more. And part of that, I think, is because they may have come to the space as creators at the same time, or roughly at the same time, as they came to the space as listeners.

And that’s something I would ask you to entertain in terms of a hypothesis, and we’re going to poke at that in future studies. But I think many people come to podcasting potentially as creators first, or at least as creators at the same time, stumbling upon the tools to get their voices out there, the tools to make a show. The tools even to put their voice on an audio file and get it out into the world might, in fac,t be the introduction to podcasting, period, for many people.

And one of the things that I think supports that is this question: How long have you been listening to podcasts? And more than 4 in 10 creators have been listening to podcasts for under a year. 28% have been listening to podcasts for six months to a year, 14% for less than six months. And I think there are two things that you can take from a graph like this. Number one, there’s probably some churn happening with weekly podcast consumers, people coming in and out of the ranks of regular podcast listeners. I know we like to think of the podcast audience as only growing, as only maintaining the gains that the audience has had and inexorably growing until it consumes all of humanity.

But in terms of regular podcast consumers, weekly podcast consumers, there’s surely some churn here—people falling out of the ranks, perhaps as they’ve gotten tired of their show or a short run podcast that they listen to has ended, et cetera. But I think the other explanation here for at least a portion of creators is that they became listeners by dint of becoming creators, that, in fact, the first podcast they may have listened to, or one of the first podcasts that they may have listened to, might have been the one that they created.

So again, creating a creator also creates a listener. And even if that podcast that that creator creates only has two or three listeners, maybe some family members, every podcast that is created may be creating two, three, four, or five listeners. If we empower a million creators, we might make 5 million new listeners. So the creator audience, the creator movement is important to growing the space, period, to growing the stability of the space.

Last couple of data points I’ll touch on here before I get to some conclusions and some things I’d love to leave you with to think about, first of all, people creating podcasts are incredibly receptive to advertising in podcasts. When we asked them, how do you feel about sponsorship messages in the podcast that you regularly listen to, 83% are positive about them. And in fact, over half say that they are interested in them and often find them useful.

I think many creators harbor the goal of monetizing their creations themselves, so it’s hard to have that desire in your head and hate advertising. I love advertising. Advertising puts food on my family. So certainly, the creators are very receptive to advertising, and they’re also receptive to the brands that do it.

One of the other questions asked in Edison Podcast Metrics is, compared to hearing advertisements in other places, when you hear ads on podcasts, how likely are you to consider the brand advertised? 44% say much more likely and 32% somewhat more likely. So about 3/4 of creators feel very positively about the brands that support podcasts. Again, many of them harbor the goal to become monetized themselves, but they’re not resistant to advertising.

And really, in a culture where so many of us are, where so many of us are paying for subscription services to avoid advertising, the fact that these creators—and, again, I’ll remind you they are part of the audience for podcasting—are so receptive to advertising I think speaks well to continuing to monetize the space.

And it’s not just advertising but also direct support. When we asked creators in the last 12 months, have you given money to support a podcast, 68% say that they have. Now, by the way, that’s not a ton higher than weekly podcast listeners, in general, who are very supportive of podcasts through direct support. But it is certainly higher. Nearly seven in 10 podcast creators say that they have given money to support a podcast. And they’ve done this in a variety of ways.

Certainly, one way amongst those who have done this, 60% have paid for at least one podcast subscription on Apple Podcasts. Many of them pay for Spotify Premium, and 48% are supporting at least one podcast on Patreon. So they’re very supportive. They’re supportive of each other, they’re supportive of the creator space, and they’re supportive of advertising.

Now, I want to leave you with a few thoughts as you go forward. And I think these are important thoughts about the creator space. And they’re also important thoughts when you think about encouraging others to enter podcasting, when you think about who your next co-host is going to be, when you think about, who can I encourage to help me edit my podcast, who can I encourage to help me work on my show, or sell advertising for my show.

I want you to think about all of these things. First of all, again, while the listener profile to podcasts is fairly close to representative of the US population, nearly 70% of those who identify as creators at every level-- again from host, to audio editing, to production, to guest booking-- nearly 70% are men. We need as an industry to do everything that we can to encourage more female creators at every level, find ways to get women more involved in the creative piece.

That is going to be the ticket to broadening the audience eventually. So that’s something that we all need to work on. We all come up with those decisions and thoughts every day about getting people to help, or having an idea for a podcast. Think about this. Think about broadening the creative space as the means of broadening the audience. That doesn’t just apply to gender. That also applies to age. Creators are wildly underrepresented 45+.

And I think that’s a shame, especially with the tools to create podcasts being easier than ever, the friction to listen to podcasts being lower than it’s ever been. And I can assure you, as someone in that demographic, I have some ideas. It’s, I think, time for the creator space to become much more widely representative of 45+. That’s going to help make the content more representative of the needs, wants, and desires of those 45+.

So again, I think that’s something, as the industry moves forward, to consider empowering people, to consider encouraging people, and equipping them with the tools to get their thoughts out there, to make their content. There is, I think, an element of economic and perhaps even academic privilege to the creation of a podcast. We see that in the creator space with the levels of educational attainment. We see that with the levels of full employment and even the figures of employment and the ability to work at home.

That speaks to an economic strata. I’ve talked a little bit about filter bubbles in this conversation. I think expanding outside of those filter bubbles is really important for the creator space. That is what’s going to lead the content to become more expansive and more broadly appealing to the United States population, in general. And that’s what’s going to help make podcasting not just grow in fits and starts, but take root, take root as a medium that is considered every day by the majority of Americans. I don’t think we’re there yet.

Now, some of those ideological biases, sociological biases, they show up in content preferences. I don’t have data yet on what kinds of content the creators are making. Hopefully, that will come in future studies. I only know what they’re listening to and what they prefer. And they are a bit of a different dog to the podcast audience, in general. They’re less likely to want to listen to things like True Crime and Society and Culture. And yet, those are two of the top four most popular topics in America. And I think the fact that creators are coming from a particular economic, societal strata is influencing the types of content that many of them are creating. And that, again, is something that I think the industry needs to address.

I mentioned this before. For many podcast creators, it is, in fac,t the creation of a podcast that might be their introduction to podcasting, period. And with every creator might come 2, 3, 5, 10 listeners. And maybe that doesn’t sound like much to the creator, but if we make a million new creators, maybe that makes 5 million new listeners. Maybe that makes 10 million new listeners, people for whom podcasting meant nothing before, but it means something now.

And then, again, we aren’t just supporting creators here. We are supporting an economy. And it’s wonderful to see just how receptive podcast creators are to advertising. It’s wonderful to see how much they support each other. The more creators that we have in the space, the more that economy is solidified, and the more firmly it can take root as creators support each other, as creators support brands. So again, building the creator space and expanding the creative space is all part of making the audience as robust as it can be. The most frequently asked question in any webinar is will this be available after the webinar? And I can assure you that it will.

You can either download it at SoundsProfitable.com/thecreators2022, or you can wave your phone at this QR code, and you’ll probably get it. So I put that there just for you, screaming into the 2020s here at Sounds Profitable.

I want to again thank our sponsors. As I mentioned before, our sponsors aren’t just logos on a page, though they are logos on a page. They are supporting our mission. It’s important for us to have broad support, to have people back us, because they’re not just backing us. They’re backing the space. What we are doing at Sounds Profitable—we have a very defined mission to make the space bigger and better, to support careers in podcasting for as many people as we can.

If my son—I have a rising senior—wants to go into podcasting and someone asks him what do you want to do when you grow up, and he says, I want to be a podcaster, I want for people to look at that as a sign of respect. I want for that to be every bit as respectful and as solid a career as wanting to go into television, or wanting to go into movies, or any other form of creative endeavor. That’s going to happen by asking the questions that need to be asked to challenge the assumptions, to challenge the received wisdom that makes this space grow and pushes it forward.

We could not do that without the people who support our mission. So again, thank you for supporting our mission, Simplecast, Podbean, RedCircle, Spreaker from iHeart, PRX, Ad Results Media, Market Enginuity, Podnews—thank you, James—and Podcast Movement. And it is, in fact, at Podcast Movement where we will be presenting our next research study, at Podcast Movement in Dallas. This is going to be a study that really challenges some of the assumptions and received wisdom about podcast advertising.

And again, we can’t do this without the support of all of you and the support of our wonderful sponsors. So on behalf of Sounds Profitable, on behalf of our entire team, thank you to my partner Bryan Barletta. Thank you, Evo Terra. Thank you so much to Caila. Thank you so much to Arielle. Thank you so much. Special thank you to James Cridland for making so much happen behind the scenes. And I thank you all for the gift of your time and attention. I’ll be on Twitter for a few minutes—maybe more than a few minutes, we’ll see—answering questions and talking about this.

But over 600 of you signed up for this on a late June Tuesday, and we’re all so appreciative of that. So on behalf of all of us at Sounds Profitable, thank you so much.

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The Ad Bargain

For 2024, Sounds Profitable will once again lead the industry in producing research studies designed to help grow the podcasting space and increase monetization opportunities. The year kicks off very aggressively with what will be sure to be a widely-cited study, The Ad Bargain. The Ad Bargain is a broad, cross-platform survey of American consumers and their attitudes toward various ad-supported media channels. The title references the “deal” consumers make when they watch or listen to ad-supported media: a few minutes of their attention to brands, in exchange for free access to content they love. Podcasting has historically been the best “bargain” for consumers AND brands, with attention, willingness to consider, purchase behavior, and positive perceptions for companies that sponsor podcasts leading amongst other ad-supported media. This study will reflect the current state of the perception of ads in podcasts compared to CTV, social media, and other platforms.

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