[ 00:00:19 ] I’ve been in a legacy broadcast guy in the broadcast business forever and two and a half years ago I put down the flag in the podcasting space so I’m at the corner of radio and podcasting with the notion that on demand audio had to be something that was going to be on the increase right. We’re doing it on the TV side who’s sitting there watching Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday at 8:00 o’clock. Nobody watching it whenever they want to watch it. That wasn’t happening as rapidly.
[ 00:00:50 ] In the audio spectrum but that’s gotten a lot easier since Apple put a podcast app right natively into the phone.
[ 00:00:59 ] And when that happened people started picking up and listening to much Taddeo much more often not only people who are producers are getting more control there’s a democratization of the content itself. So. So when you think about TV think about multimillion dollar extravaganzas and big cruise and lighting of some of that going on here but in audio you can create just about anything you want and you can do it just about anywhere you are. And so that’s very empowering especially for a lot of stars who are looking for a conduit they are looking for a way to make. Pardon the pun eye contact with the audience and they’re able to do it through podcasting. It needs to be compelling to be durable I mean there’s a lot of podcasts that come out there are things that get started and they don’t end up doing well over the long haul which just means they weren’t particularly interesting. But the notion that you can create a podcast on any subject if you’re interested in comedy skydiving I mean there’s 27 podcasts on crocheting. Gonna be fun to listen to those right. But but the notion of being able to create that content on any particular subject is so different than what we’re used to certainly in commercial radio where every format is very tight and specific. In the end you have to aggregate a large audience in order to make money in podcasting. You don’t have to be great if you did aggregate a large audience but you can live comfortably off of a smaller niche audience in a particular subject. So it sort of doesn’t matter what we’re talking about if you’re talking about music I think about music 30 40 years ago everybody had a common listening DNA. We listened to the Beatles then we moved into multiple formats. Now we have so much fragmentation I mean go through Sirius XM and there’s 150 channels of music and that probably doesn’t adequately cover everything. Now in podcasting you know the same sort of thing where you can create audio in any particular area that’s of interest and you can’t do that in commercial broadcasting as easily because they need to aggregate an audience. They need to deliver a large audience to an advertiser here or you can be much more like magazines or you know blogs where it can be much more niche based. And so that is kind of the long tail. However you can also be down at the end of the long tail. There are a lot of podcasts that are designed to attract a big audience. I know somebody who is in the real estate business and they use the podcast to speak to their small community of real estate people in Indianapolis. That’s all they need to do. They don’t need to reach thousands they need to reach a couple hundred to be expert in that category. And so you’ve got the small niche guy was perfectly happy doing that. And then you go all the way up to the big podcast so podcasts like pod save America is doing a million and a half downloads per episode daily from the New York Times. Big surprise hit. Just reach 100 million downloads. So there’s there’s this stratosphere and there’s the smaller guys and they all have the reason to be there. Podcasts can be divided into a number of different areas. There is original content storytelling content which is complex and expensive. You need writers and producers and editors and so it’s almost like a mini television production and then you have conversation podcasts and they can both co-exist. So Alec Baldwin does a podcast called Here’s the thing he interviews famous people that he has access to. They’re great interviews. And then there’s other shows from companies like gimlet with media which are much more intense produced podcasts and so they run the gamut as well so I don’t think there’s one model there are many different ways that so I don’t think that there is one specific time goal in podcasting that’s a good thing.
[ 00:05:31 ] It has a negative component to it as well. I’m from radio broadcasting and the scary secret about radio broadcasting is it’s built in 10 minute listening increments. So I come to it with a bias that shorter is better. And I like to say you know D-W don’t waste my time DWM. And so the podcast should be as long as it needs to be. My daughter has a 25 minute walk to work. And that’s how long she wants her podcast to be. She doesn’t want to listen to it later. And then I know other people who do the commute to work and listen to the balance on the way back. So there’s no right or wrong. But I think the default is in to thinking about lifestyle. People have a lot of time pressure and I go back to the New York Times when it’s a 20 minute podcast. It’s not you know I mean the newspaper takes forever to read. But they decided to make a very adjustable short daily piece and that’s their way out. So there is no right or wrong. My bias is too short. So I think engagement is largely based on the notion that people are doing something else while they’re listening they’re cooking dinner they’re cleaning the house they’re driving to work they’re taking the subway. We share their attention. And so lifestyle is going to dictate how long they listen. Very few people are going to get to the mall get to the malls anymore. They get to their destination and they’re going to sit in the car and listen. That would be the great hope of any kind of audio producer. Probably not realistic. So the content needs to be built into today’s lifestyle. I think this is where the promise of targeting actually pays off. So if I’m if I’m producing a podcast about health and wellness in Tampa a logical sponsor might be a large hospital or a medical center in Tampa. They don’t need anything else. They want people who are interested in health and wellness. So that’s a real good targeting opportunity for them. They can run ads for awareness on radio stations that can put ads in newspapers and any other media on television. But if they’re looking to reach people who are interested in health and wellness this would be a good environment so that would be a local example.
[ 00:08:11 ] And then you can scale that up national support have a discoverability problem. I mean they exist in the phone and yes you can do a search in there but most people find podcasts through word of mouth or social media.
[ 00:08:34 ] To discover that specific piece of content that they might be interested in on whatever the topic could be skydiving. They’re going to have to experiment. They’d be much better off getting a recommendation from somebody who is already aware of it. So the discoverability is one of the biggest issues in the success of podcasting. Then the other is metrics and so we’re sort of in the Fred Flintstone era of metrics here we know how many people downloaded a podcast today we don’t know how many people listen to the podcast. That changes pretty soon because Apple is going to change the way they report and Apple is so dominant and podcast and they control over 66 percent of all of the listening in podcasting. So their lack of sharing of data has impeded the growth of the business. Now they will start sharing data on when people listened and how much they listened. And that’s going to be quite valuable to brand advertisers as they try and jump into the category. The other thing that hasn’t happened that probably will happen is that Google jumps in with a mate about to date they have not. So it’s an Apple universe and it’s not a Google universe. You know there are more people on Android than there are in Apple. So when that happens this whole thing grows exponentially. This the search discovery thing is complicated by a couple of things. One apple. Has expressed no interest in the monetization of podcasting. They use it as a feature to keep people engaged with iPhones and most audio is consumed on iPhones. Most podcast audio is consumed on iPhones. And in fact one out of five minutes of all audio is now consumed on mobile devices. So you can see that trend line there. So the search and discovery part. Is still. That much more complicated. But there’s other things that are occurring. So there’s a lot of audio tagging going on there’s a lot of audio identification. So I could.
[ 00:10:50 ] Not today but very soon in the future Google something on a particular subject and it will not only give me web sites and tag other things that but again the audio segments and that’s happened on the video side that’s likely to happen on the audio side. But today as we’re speaking hasn’t occurred yet that there are people working on that. And there are certainly people working on organizing podcasting making to make it more discoverable. Kind of a giant.
[ 00:11:20 ] Endless project podcasting is not an issue anymore there are 67 million people listening to podcasts on a monthly basis and about 45 million on a weekly basis so it’s pretty big. And that number is growing. It’s primarily growing in 1834. That’s driving it. So just to compare media if TV’s average age median age is 54 which is cable news is in its 60s. Podcasting is 29. So it’s a youth media it’s really desirable to a lot of advertisers who have found millennials especially difficult to reach. This is where they are in a rapidly growing environment. Average radio listening is a little bit over four hours a day which is pretty remarkable. It’s excellent podcasters over six hours a day. So they’re all in on it again. Here we are in this TV centric environment and they’re all in a.
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