The podcast bubble that wasn't
PLUS: How YouTube is making its top creators more ambitious
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The podcast bubble that wasn’t
Bloomberg wrote about all the new podcast deal flow that’s come in the wake of the “podcast election,” which triggered widespread recognition of the medium’s influence:
The Chernin Group recently invested $40 million in Ashley Flowers’ Audiochuck. The Chernin Group is also having conversations about possible funding with Goalhanger, the UK-based company behind The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics , according to people familiar with the situation …
Meanwhile, QCODE — a podcast company that started with a focus on Hollywood and has since doubled-down on selling ads on third-party shows — has also raised a fresh round of funding, according to people familiar with the investment who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.
It is kind of amazing that it was only two years ago when everyone was framing the state of the podcast industry as a gigantic bubble that had just burst. At the time, a bunch of big celebrity podcast deals had fizzled — Prince Harry and Meghan’s being the most high profile example — and some of the larger companies like Spotify had downsized their podcast staff.
In reality, the podcast industry was just going through a correction. A lot of dumb money had flowed toward unproven celebrity projects, and investors had overestimated how much people wanted to listen to expensive narrative shows. As it turned out, most consumers prefer cheap-to-produce chat podcasts and they really like watching video versions of these shows.
Are newspapers sleeping on high school sports?
Nieman Lab reports that the Boston Globe has invested heavily in its high school sports coverage in an effort to strengthen its subscription offering:
To make these plans a reality, the Globe created a new assistant high schools sports editor role (to work alongside high school sports editor Craig Larson) in November and shifted reporter Matt Porter into a full-time high school enterprise role. The Globe has also asked other reporters and columnists to tackle high school assignments. Sports business reporter Michael Silverman, for instance, has covered topics like a pay dispute between hockey officials and the state’s high school sports governing body.
I definitely agree there's lots of community engagement around high school sports and that it's a coverage area that many local newspapers rarely even bother with outside big events like championship games.
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Fox News has a huge head start on streaming
Axios reports that Fox’s non-TV revenue — which mostly consists of its digital offerings like Fox Nation and podcasts — has reached $500 million:
In 2018, the company launched Fox Nation, a subscription streaming service focused mostly on lifestyle and entertainment content. CEO Lachlan Murdoch recently said the service has 2 million to 2.5 million subscribers …
The company has also added dozens of audio products, including new podcasts from its biggest on-air personalities, that are available free with ads, a spokesperson confirmed.
It pains me to say it, but Fox started making serious investments in its digital transition long before MSNBC and CNN. In fact, one could argue that MSNBC's digital strategy is still a joke and CNN has only in the last year or two started preparing for a serious online push. What's especially galling about this is that Fox was already trouncing both of these networks in linear TV viewership, so they had every incentive to build out online businesses.
Instead, MSNBC was just never well incorporated into the Peacock app and CNN wasted the entire Chris Licht era trying to revive its TV ratings, which was just never going to happen.
Now, MSNBC is getting spun off from Comcast, which will probably delay any major digital investments in the near future. To his credit, CNN CEO Mark Thompson is extremely serious about building out CNN's digital subscription business, but he's moving at a glacial pace.
Meanwhile, Fox has a huge head start with its Fox Nation streaming service and recently purchased a podcast network that houses many of its former stars. It managed to see the writing on the wall even though it was winning on linear TV.
News influencers are the new TV news anchors
Teen Vogue covered the rise of “news influencers” who basically record video summaries of current events and upload them to platforms like Instagram and TikTok:
Relatability, perceived trustworthiness, ease of consumption: These are just some of the reasons young people say they’re turning to these influencer voices. Online-first news outlets like NowThis and AJ+ have long understood this; more traditional outlets, however, have only just started experimenting with what has been called “talent-driven journalism,” hiring news influencers who have a strong personal brand to lead their social presence.
Very few of these "new influencers" are doing any original reporting, but most TV news anchors — especially on local stations — do little more than read repackaged AP stories off a teleprompter, so I kind of see this as a new version of that.
We were underestimating the size of the podcast industry
Bloomberg reports on new research that concludes the podcast industry is generating around $7 billion, which is nearly double previous estimates:
The podcasting industry has long relied on the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual sales number as a guide for the size of the industry. This past year, ad revenue was estimated to have reached $2.4 billion, but the figure only covers the US and only reflects audio advertising. Owl & Co. included video revenue, most notably YouTube, which has become the dominant podcast platform for podcast listening, according to Edison Research.
This doesn't surprise me at all given how much video podcasts have taken off in recent years; the video market is much larger than the audio market, and the videos can be sliced and diced so many ways across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I also think most podcast revenue estimates previously only focused on advertising and failed to recognize that thousands of podcasters had built healthy subscription businesses on platforms like Patreon and Substack.
ICYMI: How TAPinto sells local ads across 90 news sites
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Behind the paywall
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How YouTube is making its top creators more ambitious
How anime became Japan’s biggest export
Is access journalism overrated?
How much can a personal brand scale?
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