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(By Owen Grover) Podcasting is having a moment. Multi-million dollar deals, tremendous buzz, and most importantly, an explosion of compelling stories continue to broaden the medium’s reach and appeal. Advertising revenues reached $314 million in 2017, and while still small on a relative basis, this represents a 86 percent leap from the previous year. Ad growth is only expected to continue with revenues projected to double by 2020.
Audience trends paint a similar rosy picture. Fans are deeply engaged, listening an average of 6.6 hours per week. Yes, the industry is still nascent, but these numbers are a powerful indicator of the medium’s growing strength, especially considering the fragmented nature of entertainment in other formats.
Even Hollywood has taken notice, by licensing podcast content from a range of high-quality producers like Gimlet and Wondery. Investment also continues to pour in, with VCs and traditional media companies like iHeartMedia and E.W. Scripps investing heavily to tap into these passionate audiences.
While we in the industry celebrate this momentum, we also understand how much work remains to be done. There’s no question that the ever-increasing quality of audio storytelling is fueling the medium’s surge, but whither the user experience? Roughly 60 percent of listening occurs on the same preinstalled app available on all iPhones. Voice platforms represent an enormous opportunity but there is little actual podcast consumption on these devices so far. And Android, the world’s dominant mobile operating system, remains essentially undiscovered territory.
Put simply: we must do better. Podcasting – listeners and storytellers – deserves so much more.
Our Highly Engaged Fans Deserve A Better User Experience
The medium is typified by thoughtful, passionate fans who lean in and listen closely. Listener engagement is the medium’s core strength, and it’s a powerful differentiator in a digital media sea awash with clickbait, fraud, and ad blockers. In fact, studies show that people prefer ads in podcasts more than any other digital medium. Nearly two-thirds of podcast listeners have acted on ads by either researching or purchasing the product or service. That sure sounds like a powerful funnel for brands.
Beyond engagement, how does the industry’s user experience stack up against other digital mediums? The digital video industry, by comparison, delivers platform ubiquity as standard operating procedure. Apps and integrations can be found on every device, the experience syncs seamlessly across all platforms, and viewers can easily access their favorite content with minimal friction. Personalization features keep improving, from content discovery optimization to algorithmically generated recommendations. Podcasting has been around longer than digital video but has been slower to break through to a mass audience. We can point to a variety of reasons why, but here’s a better question: what lessons can we learn from the success of other media, like video?
Regardless of the conclusions drawn, it’s up to us in the industry to improve the user experience for fans of narrative audio. We must offer more tools and flexibility to provide a consistent, feature-rich experience to listeners. We must strive to provide the same level of ubiquity, access, and utility as other industries like digital video, music, and e-commerce. In so doing, we can introduce podcasting to a vast new audience that is bound to love the medium as much as we do.
It’s Time For Industry Leaders To Step Up
So what to do? First, we must dedicate ourselves, as an industry, to being where our listeners expect us to be, regardless of device or platform. That means looking beyond a single app, and includes smart-speaker and connected-car integrations, set-top boxes, wearables, IOT devices, you name it. Spotify and Pandora learned this lesson years ago; we abdicate our responsibility to the industry if we cede this territory to music-first players.
Second, we must deliver a world-class listening experience to fans. The medium is blessed with an abundance of rich, emotionally resonant storytelling. It is our job to package, contextualize, merchandise, and promote this content more effectively. A “search box and a dream” just won’t cut it anymore. This can, and should, start with great human-centered curation. It’s up to us to make it easy for influencers and fans alike to create their own playlists of shows and episodes, and make these lists social, shareable, and available everywhere. Of course, we should also build recommendation algorithms – but why ignore the incredible resources at our current disposal? Let’s walk before we run.
Finally, we must provide a greater array of monetization solutions to our industry’s most precious asset: its creative community. Right now, the industry is limited to a single business model: advertising. In fact, it’s even more narrow that it first appears because the lion’s share of those ad dollars come from direct response rather than brand, campaigns. Given the loyalty and passion that the medium engenders, it makes sense to build tools to help publishers unlock that loyalty directly with fans, right where they listen.
Some say we live in the golden age of audio. I believe we’re just getting started. Great storytelling deserves a great user experience…the industry depends on it. If you believe, as I do, that it’s time for the industry to move past its early innings, the work must start today.
Owen Grover is the CEO of the podcast listening app Pocket Casts. Prior to joining Pocket Casts, Owen spent 12 years at iHeartMedia where he was a founding member of the iHeartRadio team. He can be reached at owen@pocketcasts.com