Building Stickier Podcasts
This Wednesday from Tom Webster at Sounds Profitable: The latest data from The Advertising Landscape finds ad-supported podcasts have reached 31% monthly usage by Americans 18+, putting the medium ahead of Snapchat, X, and several other platforms a layperson would presume are “bigger” than podcasting. That said, only 61% convert to daily or near-daily listening, below the average conversion rate of 70% across all media types.
Webster brings back his pitch to podcasting from the keynote presentation of Evolutions by Podcast Movement: Podcasting has focused on building a stage, when it should be building the entire theater. A quote from Webster:
“The stage is your show – it’s where you perform, where you deliver your monologue or interview or narrative. It’s where the “official” content happens. And most podcasters stop there, focusing entirely on making the show itself better.
That’s important! Don’t misunderstand me. But it’s incomplete. A theater isn’t just a stage.”
In addition to the stage, he also establishes two other vital components. A “backstage” where the parasocial relationships are evolved into something more connective (e.g. newsletters, Discord servers, live meet and greets). A “lobby” acting as a focal point for listeners to connect with each other (e.g. community forums, comment sections that hosts actively moderate, in-person fan meetups, fan-created wikis). Point being: podcasting has done well to be listened to by almost a third of the country on a monthly basis, but it’s leaving far too many people who would be passionate podcast peeps by the wayside due to a lack of stickiness.
Podcast Industry Ad Revenue Sees Double-Digit 2024 Growth
Last Thursday from Brad Hill at Rain News: a new report looks at ad revenue in 2024. According to the data from PwC and the IAB, last year the digital advertising industry overall reached $259 billion, a 15% year-over-year increase from 2023. Zooming in on podcasting, growth continues to be the trend. Podcast ad revenue increased to $2.4 billion last year, a 26% year-over-year increase (and a healthy jump compared to the 5% increase from 2022 to 2023). While the growth is great, it did have help from a one-two punch of cyclical events (namely the Olympics and US presidential election), and the IAB cautions there likely will be some momentum lost this year due to uneasiness over how tariffs will impact advertising revenue. The full IAB report is available for free in full here.
Chrome Cancels Third-Party Cookies Prompt
This Tuesday from Allison Schiff at Ad Exchanger: 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. A quote from the article:
“Not to mention that Apple just got hit with a 150 million euro fine in late March by France’s competition authority for using its AppTrackingTransparency framework to further its own interests at the expense of competitors. France’s decision improves the odds that Germany – which is running a parallel investigation into antitrust concerns related to ATT – will come to a similar conclusion.”
As far as the near future, Google still plans to enhance tracking protections in Chrome’s Incognito mode, which currently blocks third-party cookies by default.
Video Podcasts Could Be Coming to Netflix Soon
Last Thursday from Catilin Huston at The Hollywood Reporter: During Netflix’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is constantly looking to other forms of content and content creators to feature on Netflix. To an analyst’s question about video podcasts, he responded “as the popularity of video podcasts grow, I suspect you’ll see some of them find their way to Netflix.”
A logical move, given the growth of both of video podcasting specifically, and the general open-ness of streamers to accepting content creator video on their platforms. YouTubers have been able to upload videos to Amazon Prime at will for quite a while.
Quite a few successful video game personalities have FAST (free ad-supported streaming) channels on services like Roku, re-distributing their YouTube and podcast content to the wider video ecosystem. This wider context, combined with Netflix’s open embrace of audio podcasting as a supplemental marketing strategy for their own content, suggests Sarandos’ tease will come to fruition sooner rather than later.
Finally, it’s time for our Quick Hits. These are articles that didn’t quite make the cut for today’s episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:
- Spotify and Video star in Coleman/Amplifi research & webinar by Brad Hill The first of a two-part coverage of From Explosion to Evolution: The State of Video Podcasting. Hill covers both the new report, and the debut webinar hosted by Jay Nachlis and Steve Goldstein.
- A new post on the Quill blog looks at the “subtle branding in branded podcasts,” highlighting what has worked for successful business podcasts and how they benefit brands.
- Right Side Up has run an ad on the Crooked network. The source link will take you to that ad on an episode of Pod Save America, isolated in Podscribe.
- 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.
- The New York Times takes a look at the current podcast awards scene and where the industry is at in terms of having our own Oscars.
