🚨Before we get into the news🚨: Sounds Profitable is hosting a webinar next Wednesday, March 12, at 2 PM Eastern. Tom Webster will be joined by Liz Hames from JAR Audio and special guest Andrea Marquez from Amazon as they present The Power of Branded Podcasts, featuring new research from Sounds Profitable and a key case study from Amazon. Register for this free event here and be the first to receive the report!
A handy Google Sheet detailing podcasting-related events (after-parties, meetups, etc.) and 24 sessions relating to podcasting from this Friday through Tuesday at SXSW, the majority taking place at the official Podcast Stage in Ballroom B of the Austin Convention Center. We’ve heard through the grapevine that the Podcast Stage’s sessions are among some of the most-favorited events of SXSW overall, so let’s make that even more so. If you’re headed to Austin for SXSW, we encourage all attendees to log into your SXSW accounts, fill out your profile with a photo and information, and then favorite podcasting panels you intend on attending. Having a fully-built profile really helps with networking within the SXSW app, and will help highlight panels to people who might not have come across them organically in the wider SXSW ecosystem.
The Three Most Important Statistics About News Podcast Listeners by Tom Webster
In anticipation of Sounds Profitable’s upcoming branded podcast research, Webster takes a last look at the first entry in the Sounds Profitable Education Series. The three findings include a look at the growing age disparity (the mean age of News podcast consumers is around 47 while the average age of cable TV news viewers is in the high sixties). News consumers are incredibly social with their podcast consumption, choosing to co-listen to content and consume podcasts while travelling more than the average non-News respondent. 21% of News consumers report abandoning a podcast because it had too many ads. They are a pond that can be over-fished. However 61% say they are likely to listen to brand-sponsored podcasts, and 46% say that a company’s involvement makes them more likely to try a new podcast. Webster recalls when nightly news broadcasts were tentpole family events. Podcasting’s social nature with co-listening makes it less of a lonely activity than reading articles and social media posts. News fans present a strong draw for bringing more people into podcasting as a medium, and a powerful selling point for advertisers.
Four Ways to Use Audience Surveys for Podcasts, Video, Ads and Branded Content by Paul Riismandel
A common solution to the age-old problem of figuring out what audiences actually think about your podcast is an audience survey, though they still remain not as common a fact-gathering tool in the industry as Riismandel would expect. He breaks down the strengths uniquely provided by surveys (e.g. it’s first-party data directly from the audience’s mouth), the demographics data that can be collected, and how surveys can be used to gauge response to branded content.
Podcasting on YouTube vs. Being a YouTuber
Lower Street CEO Harry Morton posted an article about the difference between simply uploading a video podcast to YouTube, and actually producing a video series meant for YouTube, as there is a fundamental difference between producing a good audio podcast and producing good YouTube content. For my fellow aging gamers in the crowd, an apt comparison would be that of a game developer in the mid-90s looking to release a powerful game on both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Each had their own unique strengths and weaknesses that made multi-platform games tricky, to the point often where the SNES version was functionally a different game than the Genesis. Morton encourages the perspective that video and audio aren’t add-ons to be integrated into an existing podcast’s workflow, but instead a separate project under the same media umbrella. Two similar products, but both built from the ground up to play to the strengths of their respective mediums, instead of trying to make the strengths of one medium also work on the other.
As for the rest of the news…
- Audiohook welcomes Carrie Legner aboard their sales team with a focus in driving direct-to-consumer client engagement and growing Audiohook’s pay-for-performance model.
- CBS News is launching its first video podcast with 48 Hours: Post Mortem, a companion podcast to standard 48 Hours releases that’ll be the first original show on the upcoming 48 Hours FAST channel (free ad-supported streaming) as well as YouTube.
- Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and creator of the sci-fi audio fiction series A Better Paradise, is publishing a novelization of the series through his new publishing imprint Absurd Ventures.
- Comedy club brand The Stand and entertainment company Cineverse are partnering to launch the WITZ Podcast Network, a comedy label operated within the larger Cineverse Podcast Network.
