By David Alpern
With apologies to Samsung’s tag line, it looks like the “next big thing” may be 
podcasting. This week Hubbard Radio announced that it is taking a 30% stake in a Beverly Hills based podcast network.
Legacy radio broadcasters are anxious to snap up the next evolution in audio media. Sources estimated Hubbard’s investment at $10 million. Just last month E.W. Scripps bought Hollywood podcasting network Midroll Media.
PodcastOne is an advertising network for more than 200 podcasts, which deliver 400 online casino million impressions per month. Some of its celebrity podcasts are hosted by Shaquille O’Neal, Adam Carolla and Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi as well as well-known public radio programs “Freakonomics” and “Radiolab.”
Podcast audiences at this moment remain relatively small but are registering incremental annual growth. 17% of Americans listened to podcasts in January 2015, up two points year over year according to the Share of Ear study published by Edison Research in February, and reviewed previously here on the Media Partners Worldwide blog.
Traditional radio broadcast companies are investing with the belief that the podcast industry is on the verge of explosive growth and point to the platform”s potential by citing the success of NPR’s mega-hit episodic podcast “Serial” that re-examined a young man’s murder conviction and has been downloaded over 80 million times since it debuted in 2014.]]>
Category: Podcasting
Podcast Chatter – RAIN Summit at NAB Las Vegas
- Norm Pattiz of Podcast One labeled the current era ‘the golden age of podcasting’ and likens the industry to the early days of traditional radio when programmers were still trying to figure out what kind of content would draw listeners
- Pattiz likened podcasting to using a DVR to record TV shows. Once you start using it, you won’t go back to ‘traditional’ media consumption. He also said he’s seeing more big brands (such as Geico, Burger King) entering the podcast advertising market
- Pattiz mentioned several revenue streams for podcasting including advertising, subscriptions, product placement, merchandising and personality endorsements
- Tom Leykis on the podcast panel said his podcast was less like traditional talk radio and more of a social network, where he could invite fans to events. Leykis said making money in podcasting was all about engaging the ‘true fans,’ the P-1s were his bread and butter
- Leykis gave props to NPR for being ahead of commercial radio in rolling out a rich library of podcasts, offering narrowed down well produced content
- Panelists suggested chopping long form talk radio shows into smaller slices, offering digital listeners interviews and shorter segments, rather than posting the entire show in a single podcast. (Although Leykis doubted that many commercial stations would pay someone $40k a year to make this happen)
- In his ‘state of the industry’ address at the end of the day, RAIN Summit West founder Kurt Hanson said, except for Pandora, the online radio listening audience will remain flat for the next several years. Hanson likened today’s Internet broadcasting to the ‘great divide’ of days past. Hanson said that’s when the FCC made broadcasters do more on their FM signals than simulcast their AM stations. Hanson says FM radio took off only when listeners could hear something that they weren’t already getting on AM
- DRONES are big this year – both on the show floor – and in NAB sessions, with panels talking about the future of using drones for newsgathering, and the legal aspects of using them now and in the future
Piolín: Hispanic Podcasting Breakthrough Talent?
Clay Gibson observed about a story of great potential significance making news this week: Eddie “Piolín” Sotelo, one of the most popular morning talents in America and host of the prior top-rated morning show radio program in Los Angeles, signed to do a daily podcast show with PodcastOne. While this Piolín podcast is likely not quite the kind of turning point that the hiring of Howard Stern was for Sirius Satellite Radio, it has the possibility to greatly raise the profile of podcasting among Hispanics. Until now, podcasting is much better known among Whites and African-Americans than among the Hispanic population. The Infinite Dial 2015 report stated that awareness of podcasting is being significantly held back by the low number among Hispanics. And while Hispanics are slightly less likely to be online or to have smartphones, this does not explain nearly all of the difference in the graph above. The better explanation is a lack of compelling programming, especially in Spanish. The hiring of a Spanish Radio superstar like Piolín for a daily podcast might change things.]]>
Podcast Popularity Leaps
Edison Research finds that daily listeners of podcasts listen to more podcast audio than any other form of audio, as the graph here illustrates.
Those who listen to podcasts spend more audio time with podcasts than any other audio media. A year ago AM/FM radio listening still predominated among this audience, but now podcasts are tops with them. The total share of podcast listening among all Americans increased by 18% over the course of one year, which is a significant jump. Podcast listeners spend an average of 6 hours and 8 minutes each day listening to any form of audio. The average American spends just over 4 hours per day listening to audio. What this means is that while some of the shift in podcast listening has come from other forms of media (in particular, AM/FM Radio,) much of it is simply new additive consumption of audio content.
When tallying the total hours devoted to podcasting, and projecting it across the U.S. population, it shows that at full adoption Americans would be listening to approximately 21 million hours of podcast audio each day – which is a very bullish assessment about podcasting’s future health and its growing place in the market for audio AND advertising.]]>