{"id":1475,"date":"2015-03-24T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T14:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=1475"},"modified":"2015-03-24T08:08:44","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T15:08:44","slug":"podcasting-an-emerging-industry-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2015\/03\/24\/podcasting-an-emerging-industry-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m sure many Sound Economics readers\u00a0regularly use podcasts to get econ-related news and discussion. Personally, I regularly tune in to APM\u2019s Marketplace, NPR\u2019s Planet Money, and and WBUR\u2019s Here and Now. Although podcasts are likely not particularly obscure among our audience, they do not register much with\u00a0the vast majority of the American public:\u00a0just 29 percent of Americans had ever listened to a podcast.<\/a> In fact, the medium is so niche that when This American Life released its podcast-only\u00a0spin-off show Serial, it provided a special\u00a0YouTube instructional video<\/a> on how to use it.<\/div>\n

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It so happens that that project, Serial, quickly became the most\u00a0successful podcast\u00a0ever. According to CNN<\/a>, Serial is the fastest podcast ever to reach 5 million downloads\u00a0and each episode has been downloaded upwards of 3.4 million\u00a0times. Unlike\u00a0most other podcasts,\u00a0those numbers are of a range comparable with the audiences\u00a0drawn by cable programming<\/a>. Whether\u00a0Serial\u2019s success is a one-off success or heralds a golden age for podcasting is yet to be seen. However, like when\u00a0other forms of mass media (such as radio and television)\u00a0were nascent,\u00a0podcasting faces a significant barrier to building an audience:\u00a0it\u2019s hard to convince new consumers to hook themselves in to the medium. This is exactly the problem addressed by the instructional video This American\u00a0Life released to accompany Serial. Although most consumers\u00a0have the materials necessary to access podcasts\u2014a smartphone or personal computer and an internet connection\u2014many do not know how to access podcasts or do not know that podcasts exist.\u00a0Because of this barrier, in the words of an industry insider<\/a>, \u201cit\u2019s a lot easier to get someone to go from one podcast to another podcast than it is to get them to go from listening to no podcasts to listening to your podcast.\u201d So, any show that draws in significant numbers of\u00a0new listeners, as\u00a0Serial seems to have done,\u00a0can\u00a0provide a big boost to other podcasts, as well. Further, because of the low cost of consumer (and producer, for that matter) entry into the podcast marketplace, it is very plausible that audiences could grow rapidly\u00a0under the right circumstances.<\/div>\n

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So, it seems podcasting is poised\u00a0for a mainstream-ing revolution. However, as has\u00a0been the case over its decade-plus long history, it is not unlikely podcasting could remain permanently niche. Although the future\u00a0of the medium is murky,\u00a0many interesting dynamics, both well-established and emerging, can be seen in the industry right now.\u00a0Over the next few weeks, I\u2019ll be\u00a0writing about\u00a0the podcast market. Specifically, I hope to touch on various advertising and\u00a0funding models behind podcasting and about the (surprisingly diverse) types of firms at play in the podcast market.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sure many Sound Economics readers\u00a0regularly use podcasts to get econ-related news and discussion. Personally, I regularly tune in to APM\u2019s Marketplace, NPR\u2019s Planet Money, and and WBUR\u2019s Here and Now. Although podcasts are likely not particularly obscure among our audience, they do not register much with\u00a0the vast majority of the American public:\u00a0just 29 percent of Americans had ever listened to a podcast. In fact, the medium is so niche that when This American Life released its podcast-only\u00a0spin-off show Serial, it provided a special\u00a0YouTube instructional video on how to use it. It so happens that that project, Serial, quickly became Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 1)<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1475"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1481,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions\/1481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}