How big a business is podcasting?

“We started doing this because too many people thought Toronto hip hop started with Drake”. The ‘this’ in the preceding sentence is the “Views Before the 6” podcast, and the ‘we’ are Big Tweeze aka Anthony Corsi and Thrust aka Chris France, a rapper perhaps best known, to Canadian hip hop historians at least, for his shouted out role in the ‘Northern Touch’ video.  

Tweeze and Thrust were part of a panel called The Business of Podcasting, held recently at Toronto’s Ryerson University. They were among the podcasters talking that night about plying their trade online and seeing where it goes. Despite the title of the event, podcasting is a business for very few. Yes, there is an increasingly brisk business in podcasting in the genre of sponsored, or branded content, but this blog post is looking at the experience of podcasting from the point of view of individual creators not directly affiliated with individual brands.

Podcast panel participants L to R:
Gina Kennedy, Anthony Corsi, Thrust, Lindsay Bess

Those assembled for the panel talked with great passion and enthusiasm for their podcast projects. When asked about how many downloads they get no one was coy. The answers were illuminating: from a few dozen to a few hundred. But it's still pretty early days for these creators. At this level it's obviously not a business, but as panelist Gina Kennedy, host of the Radio Somewhere podcast put it: "it's not a job, it's a lifestyle". Still, the trick with so many digital content efforts is to find, and to speak to, the underserved niche audience and see how far you can take things. (Ed. Note: Though there's variation across genres and topics, a rule of thumb is that advertisers like to see about 20,000 monthly downloads per episode in order to consider putting money into your podcast.)

As pointed out during the panel, in many cities radio never picked up on hip hop, even though the audience grew and grew. As a genre, hip hop is anything but ‘brand safe’, i.e. where major advertisers want to be, so the match between hip hop and mass media like radio and TV was destined to be weak. And this is why, from outside the traditional industries, YouTube channels, blogs, and podcasts emerged to serve the hundreds of millions of hip hop fans around the globe, a number of which are operating as profitable businesses. The audience and the demand was too big to be ignored, and in a reversal of the usual processes of 'getting on the air', the creators made the shows, posted them online without the involvement or approval of the usual gatekeepers, the audiences followed and told their friends, and the advertisers came in at the end of the cycle.

Even though as a technology, podcasting has been around for over 14 years, as detailed in this blog post, it is still early days in terms of the development of podcasting as an industry. We tend to think that once a technology is introduced and gets popular then dollars start to flow. The truth of the matter is that it takes a whole lot of infrastructure development until that starts to happen; from reliable metrics, to user-friendly apps to content networks and advertising networks...and we’re only now starting to get there.

So how big is podcasting as both a medium and a market? Last year there were about 30 million minutes of podcasting produced, and as a market it is currently valued at about $200 million. This value is determined by the amount of advertising dollars the medium attracted. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But a number is only big or small compared to other numbers, so let’s look at another number, in this case the value of the radio market in 2017. Over $32 billion. But podcasting’s piece of the pie is only going to get bigger, and radio’s is going to get smaller. It will take several years, and a bunch of new software and hardware developments, like making it easier to listen to podcasts in cars, but it will happen. 

For more on the State of Podcasting in 2017, see this Fact Sheet from the good people at Pew Research.
And for a statistically-based take on the question "Will radio kill the internet star?" click here.