How healthy is the podcast industry?
PLUS: The enduring legacy of Morning Brew and The Hustle
Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.
If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:
Let’s jump into it…
How healthy is the podcast industry?
There's this widely-held view that the podcast bubble has burst, but a huge portion of the turmoil in the industry has occurred at a single company: Spotify. For podcast producers outside of Spotify, it's more of a mixed bag, with some networks claiming they're still seeing robust demand on both the audience and revenue side:
“Spotify has kind of set the terms of the quote-unquote ‘health’ of the podcasting industry based on their actions as a tech company,” said Eric Silver, co-founder and head of creative at Multitude, an independent podcast collective. “But Spotify’s choices don’t have anything to do with me. It’s just that they keep failing so publicly, and now everyone thinks podcasting is dead, which really frustrates me.”
When outsiders think of podcasting, they may imagine mega-viral hits like “Serial” or long-standing institutions like “This American Life.” But for the long tail of podcast creators — those who make podcasts for a living, but aren’t getting multi-million-dollar deals from Amazon, Apple or Spotify — the industry isn’t as imperiled as it seems. And yet, Spotify’s shadow looms so large over the podcasting industry that it’s impossible for its failures not to reverberate.
An essay in Slate made a similar argument:
Look again, and you’ll notice that the middle class of podcasting—between the tech conglomerates and the dudes-in-basements crowd—is doing just fine. Unfortunately, for tech companies and the companies funding serious audio journalism, fine might not be good enough.
Adam Davidson had a front row seat to the explosive growth of the podcast industry, and he gives his diagnosis on why it's currently facing headwinds:
In 2019 there was a complete transformation. On one day, Spotify poured $400M+ into an industry that had been around $400M for the entire year of 2018. That same year Sony Music put a lot of money in, so did Amazon and SiriusXM, and countless others. The industry more than doubled in a few months. There was more money than ever. And that drew a lot of skilled people from other media or from non-media jobs into the industry.
It also bid up the price of marketing channels. They stopped being organic and became quite costly and crowded. In a world of 4 or 5 new great shows a year, you can rely on organic growth. Suddenly, there were like 4 to 5 great new shows every day.
What do you think?
Why your Facebook engagement is probably dropping
Facebook's feed has been overrun with "suggested" content from accounts you don't follow. If you've noticed a large dip in your engagement, it's likely because your content is getting buried under posts from "meme" pages that are being boosted by Facebook's algorithm because they're not divisive and don't contain links to outside websites:
[Facebook is] a necessary evil, because it captures people in your life that you would lose contact with entirely if you did not have a presence there. But it’s really troublesome to me how much of that stuff is getting flooded out by literally dozens of pieces of unrelated junk.
This is, in a nutshell, the problem with legacy social media. We can’t get rid of it, no matter how bastardized and damaged the experience has gotten, because we lose something important if we give it up entirely—even if that important thing is covered by three layers of unrelated information designed to juice engagement.
Link: How a former Cosmo editor built Australia's largest women-focused media company
Mia Freedman started Mamamia as a one-person blog and bootstrapped it into a multi-media outlet that reaches 7 million people.
Adventures in non-traditional book publishing
A bestselling fantasy novelist decided to ditch her traditional publisher and launch a Kickstarter campaign, which ultimately raised over $1 million for her latest book:
“I began writing some shorter works—stories and novellas—and posted them online in my weekly newsletter and on Tumblr. My publisher wanted me to take the material down, and I understood why—it’s difficult to publish something as a book when it’s free online, but I did not want to do that.” In the meantime, fans began clamoring for physical copies of the works Clare was posting online, especially installments of a story set in the Shadowhunters universe, Secrets of Blackthorn Hall.
“It occurred to me that crowdsourcing would be a good way to get that novel and my other recent projects published,” Clare added. “And it would give me a chance to update the Shadowhunters art and add new descriptions and trivia about the characters.”
The destruction wrought by programmatic advertising
Every piece of available research we have access to shows that programmatic ad tech is absolutely decimating the publishing industry by siphoning away revenue that was specifically meant for publishers and placing it on websites that provide no marketing value to the brands purchasing the advertising. Every publisher that has open programmatic installed is enabling this:
[ANA’s] audit of an estimated $88 billion in open web programmatic advertising spend found that only 36% of ad spending on demand-side platforms (DSP) actually reached advertisers’ “intended audiences.” … 29% of every ad dollar went toward fees for DSP and supply-side platforms (SSP), aka the adtech vendors that support the pipes of programmatic advertising … 35% of every dollar was spent on either nonviewable, nonmeasurable, or made-for-advertising inventory, or on nonhuman, bot traffic (!).
This has not only siphoned money away from publishers, but it’s also lowered the ROI on publisher-related advertising, thereby incentivizing brands to ditch publishers in their advertising spend.
I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast
One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.
In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:
Niche news sites
Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels
Podcasts
Newsletters
Affiliate/ecommerce
Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )
Tinyletter’s mercy killing
Mailchimp announced it’s shutting down Tinyletter next year.
This really is a mercy killing. Tinyletter essentially kickstarted the rise of creator-centric newsletters, but Mailchimp did absolutely nothing to improve the product and therefore provided an opening for Substack to swoop in and take its place as the default platform for editorial newsletters.
I wrote a piece a piece all the way back in 2020 arguing that Tinyletter was one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.
The enduring legacy of Morning Brew and The Hustle
Several former employees of Morning Brew and The Hustle have gone on to launch their own successful companies:
If there was one word to describe the staff at either The Hustle or Morning Brew, it was “entrepreneurial.” This was the adjective nearly everyone I talked to used to describe the attitude that permeated both companies.
“We were all very young and ambitious,” said Tyler Denk, the former senior product lead at Morning Brew. “That’s the core group of people [Morning Brew] attracted, especially in the early days.”
Want a daily dose of media industry news?
I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix:
The interesting quote from that first piece on Spotify - that many of the shows lost two thirds of their audience when they moved to Spotify - says it all. Spotify’s podcast experience is terrible. It loses your place in the episode a lot, and since there’s no separate tab for podcasts it’s annoying to switch between music and podcasts. I used to listen to Rogan’s podcast regularly - now it’s rare. And anyone else exclusive to Spotify essentially doesn’t exist for me. Acquired’s interview of Enk drove me nuts because they acted like his podcast play was genius when it was an abject failure.