By last year, at least 46 million Americans listened to podcasts each month. This year, that number will reach 57 million, according to a survey by Edison Research.
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Podcasters can sell advertisements at rates ranging from $20 to $100 for every thousand listeners. For podcasts with hundreds of thousands of listeners — and, in rare cases, millions — those numbers add up. The spending on advertisements will generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the industry this year, said Matt Lieber, a co-founder of Gimlet Media, a podcasting start-up that has raised $7.5 million from venture capitalists.
This New York Times article gets a lot wrong, and both podcast listeners and podcast producers should be clear on Apple’s actual role in podcasting today and what, exactly, big producers are asking for.
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The takeaway from the NYT story is that Leading Podcast Professionals would love ways to have more data about podcast listening habits as well as monetization features to sell access to podcasts via iTunes.
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See, this isn’t about arguing who’s right or wrong. It’s about recognizing the divergence of needs and opinions in an industry that, in many ways, is still in its formative years. I want to own and control my podcasts just like I do with my articles. I want podcasting to be a spoken extension of the written web – available to everyone, indexed with an open format, unbound by agreement terms and proprietary file formats. I want to know that, 30 years from now, I’ll be able to look up one of my podcast episodes from 2016 like I can look up a 2009 blog post on my server today.
But maybe the sad reality is that the web is an anomaly. Perhaps podcasting will end up like video, largely controlled by one platform, with other companies – each with their own terms, restrictions, and walled gardens – wanting a piece of the action. And maybe it’ll even nurture a new generation of entertainers, like YouTube did, and eventually we’ll just accept it.
But altering the fundamentals of an existing open medium concerns me today. For podcasters, the current state of the iTunes Store is almost too good to be true. I hope Apple remembers that there’s more to podcasting than Leading Podcast Professionals.
In der Folge 169: “My fingers are still moving” des “Accidental Tech Podcasts” sprechen Marco Arment, Casey Liss, und John Siracusa ab 25:30 für ca. 40 Minuten über den NYT Artikel und die verschiedenen Reaktionen darauf. Empfehlenswert.
