Today in the Business of Podcasting
How attention metrics is tuning into audio investments by Michael Bürgi
Attention metrics firm Adelaide has finished a study involving tracking an eBay campaign running across multiple publishers (including iHeart, NPR, and Audacy) from Q2 to Q3 of this year. Audio spots that ran on NPR and iHeart outperformed benchmarks by between 11% to 16%. As Audacy’s SVP of Research Idil Cakim notes, research like Adelaide’s further demonstrates that audio impressions are engaged impressions. In an omnichannel environment, audio tends to perform better than video and social media with attention metrics. [Source]
Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 with listeners migrated to YouTube Music by Sarah Perez
According to Google, the Google Podcasts app is slated to be shut down permanently in the latter half of next year in a transition to consolidating Google’s audio endeavors into the YouTube Music app. YouTube Music is slated to support podcasts globally, as well as direct RSS feed ingestion, by the end of 2023. If Google Podcasts users want to switch to an app besides YouTube, Google will be implementing a subscription export tool that will generate an OPML file that can be imported into apps like Pocket Casts or Podcast Addict. [Source]
Helping More Podcast Listeners Get the Podcast Habit by Jeff Vidler
Founder Jeff Vidler breaks down data from the Signal Hill Insights / Sounds Profitable study The Podcast Landscape to look at what we know about the habitual podcast listener versus the “dabbler,” a person who has listened to a podcast in the past 30 days, but not in the last week. When considering how to convert dabblers, Vidler points to 1010 WINS in New York, a station that uses the news-wheel formatted to constantly broadcast news content in a loop, with the tagline “You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world,” and a call to action training listeners to tune in at set points throughout their day to catch the next rotation of the wheel. Unlike “subscribe where you find your favorite podcasts,” calls to action like 1010 WINS gives brand new listeners an explanation of the format without assuming the listener is anything more than a dabbler. Podcasting would do better to embrace that beginner mindset and give the dabblers the tools to become habitual listeners. [Source]
YouTube is axing its ad-free Premium Lite subscription plan by Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Premium Lite, a low-cost YouTube Premium subscription available in select countries that allowed for ad-free video viewing and background play while a mobile device is locked, will be discontinued on October 25th. Subscribers will either be back to free YouTube or have to pay an upcharge to get standard YouTube Premium with YouTube Music access bundled in. This follows the trend of streaming services either adding ads to previously ad-free tiers, or making ad-free offerings more expensive to encourage subscribers to return to ad-supported viewing. Something podcasting has future-proofed against by virtue of ad-supported content being the norm, rather than the outlier that needs to be normalized. [Source]
As for the rest of the news… PodPod offers an extensive look into how the industry can meaningfully support queer podcasting, and new eMarketer growth shows that despite cooling growth, connected TV is lifting the programmatic market.
