Exploring The Power Of The Podcast

The podcast is an underutilised marketing haven for your business.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a noticeable and somewhat surprising boom in the popularity of making and listening to podcasts. Although podcasts have been around for some time – roughly a decade in fact – the emergence of this medium has really elevated only recently.

A lot of that has to do with listener behaviour.

Once a listener finds a podcast they really like, it’s normal for them to listen to it religiously. According to Edison Research, committed podcast consumers, on average, listen to six episodes of their chosen downloads per week. Due to the intimacy of this medium—most people listen on their mobile phones, having someone speak directly into their earbuds or headphones breeds a more close listening experience than, say, the car radio or TV in the background—advertisers are keen to reach these niche audiences with hyper-targeted ads.

Listeners trust and have so-called relationships with the hosts of the podcasts they listen to and thus, if a host endorses or mentions a product, that endorsement will hold more weight than a conventional advertisement in a magazine or radio or website banner, which are targeted towards a lowest common denominator. In short, podcasts offer a way of reaching a tribe of people who are intensely interested and engaged in a given set of subjects or ideas, which is what advertisers are always on the hunt for.

In addition to this ad-friendly quality, there’s another reason why podcasting has seen a huge boom recently: Serial. The podcast Serial was released in 2014 and became a sensation, breaking all records for downloads on iTunes. At the height of Serial’s popularity, 39 million Americans were listening as the series came to a close in late December. Though it was produced and reported by accomplished radio journalists who were already working on another popular podcast – This American Life – Serial’s entertainment value managed to tap into a swath of the market that no other podcast had before. By creating such a suspenseful and viral phenomenon—the podcast itself spawned many think-pieces, blogs, Reddit threads and recaps online—it managed to raise the profile of podcasting in general by converting a new segment of listeners to the medium who had never before listened to a podcast. When the series concluded those listeners were hungry for more, and went on to search for and find similar podcasts.

With all the growth and popularity in this medium, it’s worth looking at the business models of platforms that are delivering podcasts to listeners.

iTunes: iTunes is the default listening mode for most podcasters and definitely the primary platform for anyone with an iPhone or in the Apple ecosystem. According to Apple, there are 1 billion podcasts subscriptions spread across 250,000 unique podcasts available in the iTunes store.

ACast: A Swedish platform, ACast recently raised $5m from Swedish firm Bonnier Growth Media, as well as more funding from inventor Moor, who hopes to see the platform expand into Europe and the US. With former Spotify executive Ross Adams at the helm, ACast is leveraging and expanding upon the popularity of the medium by offering more features in its podcast, including videos, links and images that are all mobile optimised.

PodcastOne: Another leader in the podcasting space, PodcastOne’s model is to aggregate popular shows and sell ad space to potential buyers all at once, rather than asking advertisers to underwrite individual shows. A sign of their success, popular American podcaster Adam Carolla just signed up to a 5 year extension of his popular podcast with the network.

Gimlet: NPR veteran radio journalist Alex Blumberg left his job presenting on two of America’s most popular podcasts, This American Life and Planet Money, to start his own premium podcasting platform called Gimlet Media. In true podcaster style, he documented the precarious process of building this company in—what else—a podcast series called “StartUp.”  

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