Podcasting is the term describing the creation and consumption of on-demand video and especially audio. It was the “next big thing” — about six or seven years ago.
And today? Not so much.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of podcasting going on out there or a lot of people making and listening to podcasts. It doesn’t mean podcasting lacks a place in our media portfolio.
But podcasting is most certainly off the media radar. Just ask Google. Google Trends shows that news headlines for “podcasting” peaked in 2005 (and one of the headlines was “Will Podcasting Hit It Big? (And What Is It?).”
People today continue to ask “what is it?” That was the joke at the recent LA Podcast Festival, an event for podcasters and their fans, where one of the founders noted that it was one of the only places where nobody has to ask “what is a podcast?”
The most recent data from Edison Research on the Podcast Consumer seems to date to early 2012. Back then, 45% of the population was “aware” of the phrase “podcasting,” but that percentage had been unchanged for four years. Almost 30% said they had “ever” listened to a podcast, but only 17% said they had listened to a podcast in the past month, again a number that was relatively unchanged over recent years.
Despite the modest and unchanging interest in and usage of podcasts, it remains a category with a number of sure “hits.” Public radio’s This American Life, for example, reportedly averages about 800,000 downloads per episode. Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast gets an estimated 250,000 downloads per episode. Big time comedy podcasts from established personalities such as Marc Maron and Adam Carolla have tens of millions of communal downloads. And as we ride down the long tail, consultants and coaches effectively use podcasts to connect to their tribes and stoke leads, regardless how large or small.
So here are the primary obstacles standing between audio podcasting and greater fame and fortune for the category and those who play in it:
The metrics are few and far between. Libsyn is one of the primary providers of hosting and metrics to podcasters, and its metrics are limited primarily to download counts, referrals, devices and locations. And they are the state of the art.
Once a podcast is downloaded to one’s mobile device, how one interacts with that podcast — or whether one interacts with it at all — is a mystery. And the fact that many podcast apps automatically download the latest podcast from one’s favorite show makes the picture even murkier. A user may not be listening to the podcast, and he or she may not even be aware it has been downloaded.
The potential advertiser has no sense of who’s listening or for how long — or even whether they’re listening.
Naturally, there are more direct ways to assess the actual effectiveness of a podcast (effectiveness presumably being what the advertiser ultimately wants), such as by custom codes the user enters on special landing pages, or by seeing what happens when a podcast goes live and fills an auditorium with fans, as the Slate Politicial Gabfest does on a regular basis. Still, advertisers love metrics, and they’re scarce in the land of podcasting.
It takes a thousand words to paint a picture. A picture, however, is worth a thousand words. Hence pictures are the most popular ingredients on Facebook. On YouTube, videos are browsed by thumbnail — by picture. You can get the gist of a video by its thumbnail, but this is much less true in audio because the audio thumbnail is not part of the content as the video thumbnail obviously is.
This is why the most popular podcasts (according to iTunes) tend to be shows that are also heard on public radio. They are brand names — made famous by radio. They are already pre-aware and do not depend on podcasting or on discovery to make them famous.
It’s hard to discover content that must be heard — front to back and again and again — to be appreciated.
Video and pictures favor short attention spans; audio does not. In our short attention span world, the longer it takes to get to or through something, the harder it is to adopt it.
Vine videos are six seconds long, but what is the value of a six second clip of audio?
Podcasters are following the example of radio. That’s a mistake. Audio on demand is not radio. The whole premise of radio is that it’s there when you need it — a show is three or four hours long not because the producers and host of that show expect one to hear every minute but because they expect listeners to pop in on their commute for 20 minutes and hear enough of the content you want to get by. The show is built to collide with some portion of the commute — not to be heard from beginning to end.
