7.3: Podcasting and the future of audiovisual media
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In 2024 listening to podcasts and online audio hit new all-time highs, with an estimated half-a-billion people expected to listen to podcasts. The growth is driven by large increases in female listening and for 18-34-year-olds, podcast reach is now as big as TV.
In fact, podcasts are now replacing traditional media consumption with not only less TV watching but less time browsing social media and playing video games, according to research and consultancy firm KS&R.
After 20 years a once fringe medium is mainstream, fueled by the growth in smartphones, smart speakers and in-dash entertainment systems.
RECORD High Podcast Listening
Listeners spent more time with podcasts than ever with increased listening across all age groups for both women and men and in both weekly and monthly podcast listening. In fact, today the term "podcasting" is familiar to three-out-of four Americans. The result is that the gap between familiarity and listening has narrowed, with a 10 percent climb in podcast listening over the past four years.
The listening figures come from Edison Research’s Infinite Dial which has tracked digital media consumer behavior and technology use for 26 years. A January 2024 nationwide telephone survey conducted in English and Spanish used random digit dialing techniques to call both cell phones and landlines.
Other researchers say these numbers may actually be low as some podcast consumption involves co-listening, which is not counted in traditional podcast metrics. This occurs because of in-room smart speakers and in-car listening with friends, family and kids. The report comes from Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.
In the U.S. where you live also makes a difference in listening patterns. Urban audiences spend over twice as much of their daily audio time with podcasts as rural listeners, according to Edison’s Share of Ear study.
This chapter gives an overview about the landscape of podcasting, who’s doing it, what researchers have discovered about audiences, and identifies top trends.
Growth in DIVERSITY & FEMALE Audience
Among women, podcasts had the biggest listening surge since 2020 with monthly audiences up a whopping 15 percent since 2023, elevating the size of the female audience to nearly equal levels with men. That is a dramatic rise from the early days when podcasting was dominated by white male listeners.
There’s also been an increase in racial diversity with the number of Black and Hispanic podcast listeners increasing over 30 percent in the U.S. in recent years.
YOUNG People Listen Most
The largest demographic group of listeners is Gen Z (those born between 1997-2012), according to a study from Sounds Profitable. While most began listening as teenagers, a good number started as children, and they are racially diverse.
They mostly discover podcasts from social media and eight-in-10 monthly listeners say they don’t do anything else when they listen to podcasts, according to an Edison report.
While podcast listening in the 55+ age bracket lags behind that of other age groups, numbers are growing and expected to surge as technology makes podcasts easier to access through mobile devices such as a phone or tablets; use of smart speakers Siri, Alexa and Google; and cars with built-in internet access.
Young People CREATE Most
Young people also dominate when it comes to podcast creation. In terms of age, the largest number of creators are in the 25-44 age group, while those in the 55+ demographic barely exist. This can be an opportunity for both creators and advertisers.
Minorities Want To HEAR & SEE Their Communities
The Black Podcast Listener Report from Edison Research says that 43 percent of the Black population in the U.S. has listened to a podcast in the last month. Black females are more likely to be monthly listeners while Black men are more likely be weekly listeners.
It’s clear that representation matters as more frequent listeners follow or seek out content that focuses on Black stories and perspectives. Younger listeners are more likely to listen to shows hosted by Black hosts. The Black-owned news aggregation app, Hayti, is the largest source for podcasts with Black hosts, offering access to over 2,000 Black hosts.
Video is also a strong attraction for Black podcast listeners (80 percent), as they like to see representation.
LATINO Podcast Listening Hits Record
Podcast listening among Latinos has increased by 52 percent since 2020, nearly four times faster than the rate of the general U.S. population.
Edison’s fourth annual Latino Podcast Listener Report says that 38 percent of U.S. Latinos are monthly podcast listeners, a record high estimated to be 17 million Latino adults who live in the U.S. They are more likely to be employed, earn a higher income, and are more likely to be entrepreneurs.
They are listening in both English and Spanish.
Past surveys have also shown that video draws in high numbers of Latino podcast listeners (76 percent), with a large number first introduced to podcasts because of YouTube.
IHeart Media, the largest radio station group owner in the U.S. has a partnership with the Latino Oyénos audio network to distribute dozens of Hispanic-focused podcasts on the IHeart platform.
Latin America’s Boom-Bust
In Latin America there was a podcast boom in 2019, due to large investments in programming by Spotify, which at one time owned 90 percent of the market. But the company has reversed course the last few years and canceled shows and had large layoffs. An investigative reporter in Bogotá, Columbia traced the shake-up.
More ETHNIC Creators
In ethnicity, the number of podcast creators is more in line with the overall U.S. population for Whites, African Americans, and Asians, while Latino creators are growing significantly.
The data on education levels for creators does not look like the average American since 40% of creators have an advanced degree, which leads to higher levels of employment and higher income. Analysts point out that this makes the creator class more privileged than the general public, which can impact content creation.
All these numbers can be overwhelming but it’s useful to know some of these metrics as a way of understanding the birth and growth of the podcasting industry.
The KIDS Podcast Listening Report
Podcasts already have considerable reach among kids 6-12 in the U.S., according to the Kids Podcast Listening Report by Edison Research.
Forty-six percent have ever listened to a podcast, and 29 percent of ages 6-12 in the U.S. listened in the last month. That percentage soars to 42 percent if their parents listened to a podcast in the last month.
Kids listen because they think podcasts are fun to listen to and a way to avoid boredom, with the top genres being games, music, adventure, comedy, short stories, and bedtime stories such as those from Sleep Tight Stories. For parents, podcast listening is a way to connect as a family as they listen together and discuss. The national online survey of parents was administered by parents and in-home interviews.
In the U.S. and around the world there is a rise of child podcast superstars, with pre-pubescent hosts 13 years of age and younger.
KidsPod is an app for children 3-13 years of age with both free and paid subscriptions, developed with a kids’ tech expert. Co-founder Rachel Lacy says kids, just like parents, like to multitask while listening, “making podcasts more interactive helps audio compete with streaming and gaming when kids do have a device in hand.”
WORLDWIDE Podcast Audience
Worldwide, the average number of podcasts consumed monthly has grown from a quarter to about a third (35 percent), according to the 2024 Digital News Repor,t and attracts a younger and better-educated audience. The survey covers six continents and 47 markets in a study commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
According to the study, the highest reach among the 20 countries surveyed shows that nearly half of respondents in the U.S. and Spain reported listening to a podcast in the past month, with listening the lowest in Japan.
- By 2027, Latin America will have more podcast listeners than anywhere else in the world, according to research by Genuina Media.
- Edison Research has conducted surveys in five countries – including the U.S., UK Podcast Listener Report, Austraila, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa. Triton also has a Canadian Podcast Report.
- YouGov also has data about regular podcast listeners around the world.
How To FIND Podcasts
The smartphone is the most popular way to hear a podcast, although some listeners do download shows to their computer. Taking information from OP3 – the free, open podcast analytics service, Podnews created a graphic that shows Spotify as the dominant app for most of the world, while Apple is the biggest app in the U.S. The United Kingdom uses more independent podcast apps than any other large country.
You can filter apps by platform: iOS, Android. All podcast apps all have a library of podcast shows categorized alphabetically or by genre.
Most people get podcast recommendations from their friends, family, and colleagues, as well as from social media, online communities, top podcast charts, and “best of” lists.
There are also free podcast recommendation newsletters that you can sign up for to be sent directly to your inbox weekly, see the list below.
- Trailer Park: The Podcast Trailer Podcast
- Triton Podcast Rankers measures average weekly downloads of podcasts
- Edison Podcast Metrics offers measurement of top podcasts, networks, and shows listened to by women, Black listeners, etc.
- New Podcast Trailers, from the creators of The PodNews daily newsletter, which also has new podcasts.
- Podcast The Newsletter (Weekly recommendations on a variety of podcasts)
- Earbuds Podcast Collective (5 podcasts on a theme curated by someone new)
- Find That Pod (5 recommendations each week, archive)
- Radio Ink (Daily headlines and news about new podcasts)
- Podcast Guide (Community search engine for podcasts)
- Your Next Podcast (Podcast that recommends a new podcast)
- Podnews (Global news about podcasting including new and continuing podcasts)
- ‘Best Of’ from: Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, New York Times, Appendix B
- Riverside has a list of 15 best popular podcasts of 2024
Podcast APPS
In podcast listening, listeners can use open podcast apps that support Podcasting 2.0, which seeks to standardize and improve delivery of podcasts to all audiences and not just those who have paid for access.
They include:
- Podcast Guru (Apple & Android)
- Podcast Addict (Android)
- Antennapod (Android)
- Pocket Casts (Apple & Android)
- Podverse (Apple & Android)
- Apple's Podcast app
- See list of all podcast apps that support Podcasting 2.0
Hosting services that support Podcasting 2.0.
Podnews has a list of host services and how to add your podcast to every podcast directory.
How MANY Podcasts Are There?
In all, the number of podcasts is considered to be between 2 to 5 million. The differing numbers reflect the podcast directory being used.
Podcast Index, which is primarily built from discovering open podcast RSS feeds on the web, says there are more than 4 million podcasts.
The Apple Podcasts catalog lists nearly 3 million podcasts while Spotify says they have more than 5 million podcasts, reported by Podnews.
How Many Are ACTIVE?
While it may seem like there are too many podcasts competing for ears and eyes, many of the large numbers of podcasts created during the pandemic years are no longer in production. By July 2024 the number of active podcasts – meaning that a new episode has been released in the last 90 days – dropped to 13.4%, according to figures from PodMatch.
Most significantly, more than half of all that listening now happens on YouTube and Spotify combined, with one-third using YouTube followed by a quarter on Spotify, according to a survey by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.
Listeners Average EIGHT Podcasts A Week
Overall in 2024 people listened to an average of eight podcasts a week, with females listening to even more, according to Edison Research.
Hard-core listeners consume 12 or more podcasts a week, while medium listeners hear three to six podcasts weekly and the casual listener one to two shows.
Podcast “super listeners,” spend an average of 11.2 hours listening to podcasts weekly, up from previous years. Over half of this group listens to podcasts through YouTube, often discovering new podcasts through the platform.
What Are The Most Popular GENRES?
In the U.S. the most popular genres are Comedy, Society & Culture, News, and True Crime, followed by Sports and Education.
In particular, Gen Zer’s value diverse podcast content and the importance of mental health with a focus on self-care and unplugging.
TRUE CRIME, INVESTIGATIVE Podcasts
Among the overall audience, listening to the True Crime genre remains immensely popular with shows regularly at the top of podcast charts, spurred by the phenomenal success of Serial. Some cover cold cases and unveil family secrets while others bring publicity to underrepresented communities looking for justice.
Criminologists say interest in true crime is driven by the basic human emotion of fear, allowing people to experience fears without the consequences of actual trauma. Rolling Stone came up with a list of “The best 25 True-Crime Podcasts of All-Time.”
In a similar vein, investigative podcasts may involve true crime but they also run the gamut – terrorism, corporate or political scandals, health care, or inequality in education.
Both genres are expensive to produce and time-consuming to create because this kind of watchdog journalism can take weeks, months and even years to come to fruition. “I believe investigative journalism is really like you are solving a mystery,” said LA Times reporter Joanne Faryon.
The Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) at American University in Washington, D.C., has a look at how investigative reporters develop their stories for audio.
NEWS Podcasts
Globally, the number of news podcasts has increased and several regularly rate at the top of podcast charts according to a 2023 Pew Research Center Report.
One-in-three adults ages 18 to 29 listen at least sometimes to get news from podcasts, making them the largest demographic listening group. But more than half of Americans (56 percent) say they never get their news from podcasts, which means there is still significant growth potential.
While just one-in-five U.S. podcast listeners listens to podcasts from a news organization, the legacy media organizations have put money, time, and staffing into news podcasts – from audio organizations such as NPR to national publications like The New York Times, which is building an audio empire by buying audio companies and adding more podcasts.
A Pew survey found the most popular news-related podcast format to be when a topic in the news is explained in depth (57 percent), followed by a host offering opinions (53 percent), or a summary of the major news stories of the day (51 percent). “Most consumers are looking not for more news, but news that feels more relevant, and helps them make sense of the complex issues,” says the report.
News Podcasts Worldwide
- The Daily(New York Times)
- Up First(NPR)
- Simple English News Daily (a seven-minute daily podcast with news from four continents, has reached five million downloads)
- Post Reports(The Washington Post)
- Today Explained(Vox)
- CNN 5 Things(CNN)
- Global News Podcast(BBC)
- FT News Briefing(Financial Times)
- Please Explain(The Sydney Morning Herald)
- Today In Focus(The Guardian)
- La Story (The French newspaper Les Echos)
- The DR(Danish Broadcasting Corporation)
TOP-RATED News Podcasts
The massive success of The Daily from The New York Times, is credited with driving the growth of news podcasts, which attracts a younger and better-educated audience than traditional media. Since being launched in 2017, the powerhouse explanatory podcast has been downloaded more than 3 billion times with some 20 million people listening monthly. The format takes one big story and explains the issues in depth for 20 to 40 minutes.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Times would start putting up a paywall for audio but it would be limited to old episodes while new shows would continue to be free.
The Times launched a shorter daily news podcast in 2023 that covers three top stories in about 10 minutes. The Headlines can be heard on New York Times Audio, an iOS app for subscribers. In addition to podcasts, the app will have audio features curated by Times journalists.
Among competitors, The Washington Post offers The 7, which explores seven or more important or interesting news stories of the day with reporting and insight in about a 10-minute time span, while Reuters World News has a 10+ minute news briefing, and the BBC has a 15-minute news podcast aimed at 16-24-year-olds around the globe.
Also topping the podcast charts are two NPR news podcasts. Up First is the daily news podcast discussing the three biggest stories of the day with reporting and analysis in 10 minutes. NPR News Now has the latest hourly news in 5 minutes.
In the best news podcast category, Vox’sToday Explained won the 2024 Ambie for excellence in audio. The podcast covers the most important news of the day in about 30 minutes. The award comes from the professional member association, The Podcast Academy
News listeners generally view news podcasts as accurate, especially compared with news from social media. But there are danger signs ahead as the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid the news has grown sharply worldwide because consumers feel it has a negative impact on their mood and because of concerns over false and misleading news.
Top Podcast HONORS
Podcasts are now recognized at the highest levels of excellence in American journalism, with prizes that include the Pulitzer, Peabody, du Pont-Columbia Awards, and The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), among others.
Investigations have righted wrongs by getting inmates released from prison and exposed injustices that resulted in new national laws.
The U.S. Supreme Court felt the impact of a podcast in 2019. The In The Dark podcast prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to review and throw out the murder conviction of Curtis Flowers, a black Mississippi death row inmate who had been tried six times for the same crime.
A new trial was ordered after the investigative unit of American Public Media uncovered evidence of a pattern of racist jury selection by the prosecutor. After 23 years, Flowers became a free man after the Mississippi attorney general dropped state charges against him. The show also won top journalism honors including the Peabody, George Polk, and Edward R. Murrow awards.
Creation of the national sex-offender registries came after the 2016 podcast “In the Dark” documented how police mishandled the child abduction and murder of a small-town Minnesota boy.
The prestigious Pulitzer Prize Board added a new category for Audio Reporting in 2020.
2020: The first Pulitzer was awarded to “This American Life” for its reporting on the personal impact of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
2021: NPR took home the second-ever Pulitzer for Audio Reporting for an investigative report about Iowa-based gun rights advocates, looking at how two brothers used social media to try and eliminate gun regulations in America.
2022: A third Pulitzer was won for a podcast about juveniles sentenced to spend their whole lives in prison. Suave was produced by two non-profits, Futuro Media and PRX. The U.S. is the only country in the world that allows juveniles to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and the podcast tells the story of one man’s redemption.
2023: Gimlet Media and journalist Connie Walker won the Pulitzer for audio reporting in a series that revealed the abuse of Indigenous children at an Indian residential school in Canada, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s.
For a behind-the-scenes look at how such stories come together, there is a six-episode podcast, Pulitzer on the Road, that talks with the 2023 winners in conversations with Pulitzer Board members.
2024: The latest Pulitzer for audio reporting went to You Didn’t See Nuthin, a series that revisits a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s utilizing memoir, community history and journalism, produced by the staffs of The Invisible Institute and USG Audio. This is the fifth Pulitzer won by an investigative journalism podcast since the audio reporting category was created in 2019. This same podcast was also awarded the Peabody Award, given to the “most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and streaming media during 2023.”
Other top awards: The 84th Annual Peabody Awards, rewarded “stories that matter,” in news to entertainment programming. In the Radio/Podcast category there were five winners, including two different podcasts from The Washington Post. Winner Moriah Balingit was one of the reporters who embedded in a Richmond, Virginia high school to explore how students are dealing with gun violence in “Surviving to Graduation.”
Previous Peabody Honors for groundbreaking investigative podcasts have gone to such podcasts as Serial, S-Town, and In the Dark.
The Divided Dial covered the beginnings of conservative talk radio and how what happens on the radio still shapes the American political landscape.
This American Life: The Pink House at the Center of the World offered stories from the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, focusing on human lives at the clinic at the center of the legal case, Mississippi’s last abortion clinic.
So Does EVERYONE Have A Podcast?
It may seem like everyone has their own podcast since technology has made it possible to be your own creator and publisher – giving more people a voice to be heard. But it’s not just individuals who podcast, its institutions, government, business, the arts, religion, non-profits, and education.
The power and reach of the medium are so pervasive that the U.S. Library of Congress has its own podcasts and added podcasts to its archive “as part of its mission to collect and preserve sound recordings,” and is contacting selected podcasters to seek permission to add their shows.
The Smithsonian’s storytelling got a boost from a partnership with PRX. Their podcast, There’s More To That, covers history, science, and culture with journalists from Smithsonian Magazine. Among the first episodes were the backstories of two blockbuster movies, Oppenheimer and Barbie.
Podcasts in EDUCATION
In education podcasts play a variety of roles – encouraging student learning, creation of content, and allowing for greater access to information from the deep research done in academia. Students can download a podcast lecture to a mobile device and get 24-hour access. In today’s fast-paced world, students will listen longer than they will watch or read and are able to go back over material they find difficult.
While some educators may want to keep their content restricted to enrolled students, other colleges and universities have created podcasts for public consumption. A wide variety of topics include business, medicine, law, the environment, enrollment, administration, and a number that feature academic research or revolves around academic stars.
“Deep Background with Noah Feldman” from Harvard explores the news from a historical, scientific, legal and cultural context. “View From The Top” is based upon a Stanford University Dean speaker series. Other podcasts feature students, such as “A Hard Look,” a podcast by the Administrative Law Review that I advised in their startup for the American University Washington College of Law.
HIGHER ED PODS
It’s now a bit easier to find the wealth of higher education podcasts in one place thanks to a new searchable podcast directory called “HigherEd Pods,” which lists hundreds of shows. The goal of the site is to build a higher education community for those involved in producing and marketing college podcasts.
In addition, the “Continuing Studies Podcast” provides tips and best practices with a spotlight on university podcasters and conversations about admissions, alumni, and explaining concepts such as Podcasting 2.0 with podcast expert James Cridland, editor of the Podnews newsletter.
STUDENT PODCAST Challenge
For students, NPR sponsors an annual podcast competition for middle and high school students (grades 4-12) and a separate competition for college students, with the winners stories put online.
For college students the Podcast Challenge time comes in the fall with a $5,000 grand prize scholarship and $500 prizes to finalists. In 2023 there were 10 college finalists with topics about climate change, gender and identity, campus politics, and mental health, offering both sound-rich podcasts as well as strong writing and narration. The winner was a deeply personal narrative about a college student with a rare mental health condition. The competition opened again in September 2024 with a deadline for submissions in January 2025. No faculty involvement is required.
For younger students, there were more than 3,300 entries from 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, on topics from what makes Michigan the best state, to trauma and school shootings. NPR determined 13 middle school and 13 high school finalists. The high school winner unpacked how the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis affected students and the community. The contest opened for entires in January 2025, and no teacher involvement is needed.
BRANDED Podcasts
In the vast podcast ecosystem, companies offer their own branded podcasts as marketing and storytelling tools – creating a way to engage with listeners while also sharing brand information. The goal is not just selling products or services but to build brand loyalty by creating a bond with listeners. Quill has a white paper with case studies and measurement of brand podcasts.
Financial services giants like Charles Schwab, have podcasts with advice as well as a look at the political landscape for investments. Sporting goods company REI has podcasts with outdoor enthusiasts sharing their stories on ultra-running, hiking and bike building, and the Sephora Collection has chats about self-image and becoming more confident.
INTERNAL Podcasts Are Growing
In addition, a number of businesses do internal company podcasts, which, in some cases, replace the company newsletter.
Companies use podcasts to:
- Keep employees connected, feeling valued, and build company culture
- Keep up-to-date with the latest developments and avoid screen fatigue
- Do employee training, development, and onboarding of new hires
- Engage in difficult conversations
These private podcasts are done the same way as public ones, but businesses can restrict who has access. Content can be accessed on popular listening apps, but it’s not publicly displayed on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and others. The podcasting firm uStudio has seen its clients now produce an average of 10 podcasts using its platform, according to Digiday.
What Are The TOP Podcasts?
Identifying the top podcasts depends upon which metric is used since there is nothing like the “Top Billboard” chart for music or the Nielsen ratings for television.
When it comes to audience numbers you need to know how to read them.
- Download is an episode download that may or may not be listened to
- Listen, or a play, is when a human being has pressed the play button
- Stream normally means a “listen” but doesn’t really exist in podcasting
In the podcast world there are analytics from podcast hosting services like Libsyn or Captivate, from third-party rankers such as Triton and Podtrac, and from podcast apps like Apple or Spotify.
The most complete data comes from podcast hosting services as they have data for all RSS platforms like Apple and Spotify, which has added "Listen Time" to their podcast dashboard. That is defined as the “the total number of hours people have spent listening to or watching your episode.”
Rankers like Podtrac publish a monthly list of Top 20 Podcasts and of Top 20 Publishers, based on downloads, while Triton does a weekly average. These podcast rankers are produced monthly on a per region or country basis.
In contrast, Edison Podcast Research measures listening and not downloads across all networks, shows, and platforms. They publish quarterly reports of the top 50 podcasts in the U.S., the top podcast networks, top podcasts among women, among Black listeners, for new hits, and even for shows with the highest portion of their audience that listens exclusively.
A podcast app such as Apple Podcasts Connect, Spotify for Podcasters, or YouTube Studio measures only the data on their platform. More about audience measurement in Chapter 10.
Podcast HISTORY Is Humble
The start of podcasting began with three people – a former MTV video jock, a software engineer who pioneered blogging and developed the web feed known as RSS, and a former journalist/writer.
In 2001, media personality and entrepreneur Adam Curry, shared an idea in a blog post that led to podcasting. You can now see that post and learn the intriguing story of the first podcast feed, thanks to research by journalist and podcast creator Eric Nuzum.
Curry had met in a New York City hotel room with software engineer/blogger Dave Winer, the pioneer who created the tools that drove blogging and distribution technology. He posted about that meeting, “Adam wants the Internet to be Everyman’s broadcast medium, to route around TV and radio broadcast networks, with no compromise in quality. Now if this were easy, or the solution obvious, we’d already be doing it. But there’s a big sticky problem in the way, the pipes don’t seem big enough,” wrote Winer.
It wasn’t long before Winer had made the code changes to RSS that allowed for audio enclosures and the first podcast feed was released using one Grateful Dead song, which not many people heard. But it was the day when written word blogging moved over to distributing audio.
It took another two years for the first podcast by Winer and journalist Christoper Lyden, created after a blogger conference at Harvard University. It became what is now the world’s longest-running podcast, Open Source.
Podnews offers a history lesson on podcasting in the United Kingdom.
The WORD ‘Podcast’
The word podcast comes from the words “pod” -- as in iPod -- and “broadcast.” It was in 2005 that the Oxford Dictionary named “podcast” as its word of the year after journalist Ben Hammersley coined the term the year before in the first major print publication. Podnews offers a look back at evolution of the word.
In the early days, podcasts mostly came from radio corporations such as NPR, looking for new ways to distribute audio programming. Traditionally, a podcast has been defined as a digital audio file available on the internet that can be downloaded on a computer or digital device and is automatically received by subscribers.
But today, listeners are discovering podcasts in multiple ways, including on YouTube and Facebook rather than podcast apps. While some believe the only true podcasts are downloadable audio, others say it has emerged today to be something more like a storytelling experience whether it be video or audio, or both.
The BOOM YEAR Podcast
It was the launch of “Serial,” that began the boom year for podcasting in 2014. The podcast shattered records at the time and has over 300 million downloads to date. The show was also the first podcast to win the prestigious Peabody Award, which rewards stories that matter.
In that first series, Sarah Koenig’s narrative podcast told a single, non-fiction story over 12 episodes, using a narrator. The story was spun off from public radio’s “This American Life” and focused on the 1999 murder of a 15-year-old girl from Baltimore. A former high school boyfriend named Adnan Syed was convicted of the crime and spent 23 years in prison. However, the Serial podcast shined a light on the case, and a Baltimore Circuit Court Judge overruled the conviction, setting Syed free in 2022.
Then in another flip in the case, a Maryland appellate court reinstated the conviction in March 2023, deciding the victim’s family did not have enough time to attend a hearing case in person. In 2024 Maryland’s Supreme Court upheld the lower court so a new hearing will be held on whether the conviction should be thrown out. Syed remains free while his case is heard.
Serial is credited with opening the doors for other popular podcasts to be consumed by mass audiences in the so-called, “Serial effect,” especially in the True Crime genre. Vox has a retrospective on the role of Serial in the genre boom.
PODCAST TRENDS
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- YouTube Leads Video Podcasts
- Podcast Trust & Misinformation
- Inclusivity in Podcasting
- Podcast Optimism Returns
TREND: THE MANY USES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Podcasters are primarily using artificial intelligence to enhance workflow – to generate ideas, create transcripts and show notes, help with editing, create cover artwork, and for marketing materials. There are both free and paid services.
- AI-generated podcasts
- Creation of Transcripts (see Ch. 9)
- Creation of time-stamps
- Podcast Topic Ideas
- Writing of Social Media posts
- Translation Tools
- Creation of Cover Artwork
- Creation of Podcast Music
- Guest Research & Bios
- Writing of Scripts
- Suggesting Interview Questions
- Podcast Editing
- Creating short videos from video content
- Writing/Voicing of Podcast Ads
- Deepfakes – AI Voice Clones
- The Podcast That AI Built
- Draft Thank You Emails for podcast guests
Choose Wisely on AI Tools
As the saying goes – just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. The use of some AI tools is not entirely innocent and carries the potential for societal harm. Since artificial intelligence is built from already acquired data, when such information is flawed or incomplete, it ultimately results in reinforcing implicit and explicit bias. You can make up your own mind on whether of AI tools help or hurt the podcast industry but it’s well worth an ethical discussion.
AI-Generated Podcasts
Podcasts that are entirely created by AI are here. Hacker News TLDR recaps headlines from Hacker News, the social media site on computer science and entrepreneurship, with shows running 13 to 20 minutes in length. The tech podcast, The Automated Daily, looks for news to generate headlines of the day. The host is named “Trend Teller” and show length is between 4 and 7 minutes, according to a sampling.
AI Turns Blog-to-Podcast
Written blogging can now be turned into podcasting thanks to a new feature being offered by leading podcast platform Podbean. AI voices turn the blog into audio with a choice of up to five languages or countries. You can review and edit before publishing. Podbean has a community of over 640,000 podcasts, and the hosting service comes with a free podcast website. You can see how the new AI feature works here.
Podcasting and the future of audiovisual media
All of this information about podcasting gives us a sense of the boom that has taken place in recent years. The long-term future of your favorite podcast may be difficult to predict, but as an industry it seems poised for lasting relevance because it connects target audiences with in-depth, compelling, often serialized content. These traits combined make for a sound strategy, and this is to say almost nothing of video podcasting or vodcasting which, of course, adds visual elements to the mix.
Individuals, brands, and major media corporations all see viable value propositions in podcasting. In the next section, the Art of Clarity for audiovisual media, a podcast script template highlights some of the most common elements shared by successful podcast producers.
Additionally, radio script templates, video script templates and a few suggested activities are included.