A love letter to podcasts
Welcome to an update from Unmade to start the week.
Today: The wonderful medium of podcasting turns 20.
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In praise of Ira & Scott & Kara & Richard & Marina & Sean & Michael & Adam & Ezra & Rory & Alastair & Craig & Irene & Wade & Jake & Vivienne & Kevin & Casey & Lauren & Matt & Peter & Ruby & Osman & Scott & Hamish & Andy & Katy & Amol
An email from Apple dropped into my inbox this morning.
I’d love to think that the striking piece of artwork - two microphones front lit to create a numeral “20” - was a crafted photoshoot rather than something generated in AI, but regardless, it’s a big anniversary.
It’s 20 years since Apple took the medium to the mainstream when it added podcast support to its music listening service iTunes. Remember, in 2005, that was two years before the iPhone.
Podcasts were a new killer app for the iPod audio player. Not that the App Store was a thing back then either.
When we started the Mumbrellacast 16 years ago, I must admit it felt like we were late to the party. In the scheme of things, I think we can now claim to have been early.
What a wonderful, intimate medium podcasts are.
Great writers can win you over, but the words on a page still come through a filter. TV stars may be right there in your lounge room, but they still look at you from the corner of the room, via a glass screen. Podcasters are right there in your ears.
I’ve developed more parasocial relationships with podcasters than I have with the stars of any other medium. Ira & Scott & Kara & Richard & Marina & Sean & Michael & Adam & Ezra & Rory & Alastair & Craig & Irene & Wade & Jake & Vivienne & Kevin & Casey & Lauren & Matt & Peter & Ruby & Osman & Scott & Hamish & Andy & Katy & Amol are all people I would pick up from the airport. I’d tell Karl to get an Uber.
So after 20 years, where are we?
According to this month’s new edition of the annual Infinite Dial survey, commissioned from Edison Research on behalf of the radio industry, 52% of Australians say they listen to a podcast in the last month.
That’s been an upwards trend over the last nine editions of the survey from a starting point of 17% in 2017.
Admittedly that number may be on the high side. As Pearman Media’s Steve Allen pointed out when I wrote about The Infinite Dial, Roy Morgan Research reports a lower number - 27.5% over the previous four weeks.
And The Australian Communications and Media Authority has a different number again, closer to the Infinite Dial data. ACMA’s survey says 50% over the previous seven days.
Regardless, you only have to look at The Australian Podcast Ranker’s monthly charts from Triton Digital to see that podcasts have found a place.
The Ranker numbers suggest Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr is reaching 8.6m monthly listeners a month. ARN Media’s iHeart is just behind on 7.5m. The ABC is on 3.2m.
Yet very few podcasts are reaching broadcast numbers. Even the most popular locally made podcast The Hamish & Andy Show reached only 900,000 listeners.
However, there’s then a long tail of podcasts with significant enough monthly listener numbers to be taken seriously. Some 63 podcasts reached more than 100,000 listeners in May.
And that’s what’s also the biggest failing of the local audio industry. Each of those 100,000-strong cohorts likely have similar interests, and are deeply engaged in a way that would rarely occur in broadcast, particularly when sold to by the host’s own live read.
Yet podcasting, more than any other medium, has failed to break out from the metrics so actually sell its power.
For all but the most popular podcasts, the moment your sales person fall into a CPM conversation with a media buyer, then you’ve lost.
Take the example of Unmade as it’s the niche I know.
Over time, that 172,000 downloads sounds relatively impressive, even if the average downloads of a new episode is less than 500 over the first 30 days. Even a good one gets a little over 1,000.
If you get into a CPM conversation, then you could argue an ad should only cost $50 based on that 1,000 listener number. Hard to monetise. But think of it another way. Sticking with the Unmade example, if you were an agency looking for new business, and you knew that even 10% of those listeners - so let’s say, conservatively, 100 - were senior marketers, how much would you be delighted to pay in the real world to know that those 100 marketers have just heard warm words about your agency at the perfect moment? I bet it would be a metric shit ton more than $50.
Hell, I know one CMO who regularly lets me know what he thinks of episodes. What would his agency roster - or their rivals - think the chance to reinforce their value to him every single week is worth? Again, more than $50, I suspect.
That’s just the Unmade example I’m familiar with, but it’s true of many other niche podcasts - so long as the right product is promoted to the audience. It just shouldn’t be a CPM conversation.
My hunch is that one reason the monetisation of podcasting is running slower in Australia than in equivalent markets is because of the dominance of the radio players who have radio ways of selling such things.
Podcasting is a wonderful medium but its long tail will not find success by merely talking about the numbers.
Even after 20 years, I’m not sure we’ve made much progress with that.
Time to leave you to your day.
I’ll be back with more for Unmade’s paying members tomorrow, as we close out the financial year and look at the FY25 winners and losers.
Don’t forget our EOFYS offer!
Have a great day
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Tim, thanks that you showed the Unmade downloads. And yep, I do read each time Unmade is published, so I am in your court.
Despite that data being accurately collected there is another issue that needs to be considered. Downloading is the maximum possibility of 'an audience'.
I recall ages ago when 2-seconds was counted (and too often still is) for ads despite of the download's nett duration. E.G. the 2-second requirement in a 30-second ad was considered a valid part of 'the audience'. So, anyone who had 2-seconds on their device was considered equal of the 30-seconder.
IMHO ... your graph tells quite a valuable story.
Television since 1991 did not allow 'tuning-in' as 'an audience'. It was calculated based on 15 seconds within the program duration. The result was 'average minute'. They are now also including 'the reach' ... those who tuned in during the content.
Cinema relies on tickets - pretty accurate because if you pay you visit and stay. Print relied on sales (or handing them out at the footy) and not on what proportion of the publication was seen.
OOH ... an appropriate name. MOVE 1.0 took a couple of years to get it into the market. It was a model based on masses of data and complex software to provide audience estimates (pretty accurately). The next version - MOVE 2.0 - well we have to see when it is finally finished. What I have seen is pretty clever