The podcast purists strike back

Consolidation in the podcast space will probably help indie podcasters in the long run.

Image via Pixabay

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The podcast purists strike back

If you’ve been listening to podcasts for the last several years, you probably noticed your favorite shows carry a lot more ads than before and that fewer of those ads are read by the hosts. That’s because the industry has gone through a lot of recent consolidation that combined hosting, distribution, and ad tech in such a way that it’s now much easier for podcasts to leverage programmatic advertising.

With most of this ad tech still nascent in its development, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s experiencing hiccups. The Verge published a good piece about “multiple examples of programmatic advertising going wrong.” The article gives the example of a trailer for an adult-themed TV show running on a kids podcast. Another show carried ads from BP and ExxonMobil despite the fact that its hosts explicitly blocked oil and gas sponsorship.

The article sparked an outcry from a community I’ll refer to as “podcast purists.” These are the people who lament the industry consolidation and claim it’s deteriorating the open podcast ecosystem. They long for the days when every single podcast was distributed via RSS and therefore available on all apps. Sometimes they’ll even argue that a show shouldn’t even be referred to as a “podcast” at all unless it comes with a publicly available RSS feed.

Marco Arment, the founder of Overcast, is one of the most prominent members of the podcast purist community, and he joined in on the dogpile. “Big platforms and ad-tech companies ALWAYS sell us all on a dream,” he wrote on Twitter. “You’ll make more money! It’ll be easier! It’ll be more accessible to small producers! And it almost never pans out that way. The middlemen siphon off most of the money, and the platforms become monopolies.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m definitely ambivalent about all the podcast consolidation afoot. One of my favorite shows recently became a Spotify exclusive, and I made the tough decision to stop listening to it because I didn’t want to be strong armed into leaving my podcast player of choice.

But I also think these industry developments present a massive opportunity for podcasters, especially independent shows. There are thousands of podcasts that have passionate, loyal audiences, and yet they struggle to find sponsors because they don’t meet the listener thresholds of the biggest podcast networks.

A similar problem once afflicted the YouTube community. Today, it’s taken for granted that YouTubers with large followings generate full-time incomes, but it wasn’t that long ago that you could have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and still struggle to make ends meet.

That was the case for Gaby Dunn, who in 2015 ran a YouTube channel with her friend that had over 500,000 subscribers. As she wrote for Splinter at the time:

And yet, despite this success, we’re just barely scraping by. Allison and I make money from ads that play before our videos, freelance writing and acting gigs, and brand deals on YouTube and Instagram. But it’s not enough to live, and its influx is unpredictable. Our channel exists in that YouTube no-man’s-land: Brands think we’re too small to sponsor, but fans think we’re too big for donations. I’ve never had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at once. My Instagram account has 340,000 followers, but I’ve never made $340,000 in my life collectively.

The high highs and low lows leave me reeling. One week, I was stopped for photos six times while perusing comic books in downtown LA. The next week, I sat faceless in a room of 40 people vying for a menial courier job. I’ve walked a red carpet with $80 in my bank account. Popular YouTube musician Meghan Tonjes said she performed on Vidcon’s MainStage this year to screaming, crying fans without knowing whether she’d be able to afford groceries.

This is why so many YouTubers from that era fell victim to the predatory practices of multi-channel networks; they were desperate for the advertising revenue those MCNs promised. The YouTube partnership program existed back then, of course, but it didn’t yet have mass adoption from brands.

Today, YouTube is a video advertising behemoth, and creators are largely the beneficiaries of its success. It’s now paying out $10 billion a year to creators, and YouTubers can opt into its ad platform with as few as 1,000 subscribers. There aren’t many podcasters today with 1,000 listeners who can consistently find sponsors.

We’re probably still a few years away from brand dollars flowing to small podcasters, but that future is coming. Spotify’s Anchor, for instance, is already allowing users to opt into its ad network, and it’ll just take time to educate brands about its marketing ecosystem. This will trigger an explosion in creativity, so much so that some of the most popular podcasts a decade from now likely haven’t even launched yet.

And for the record: I don’t think the open podcast ecosystem will ever fully go away. Sure, the big shows will get sucked up in exclusive deals, but it will always be beneficial to new podcasters to maximize their exposure across platforms. The podcast purists can still have their utopia.

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.