Podcasts are eating (and saving) the world
My prediction is (at least in the US) podcasts will continue to grow as a percentage of media landscape, particularly vs. books (print and ebook/Kindle), audiobooks (e.g. Audible), long-form free video content (YouTube), and subscription or broadcast video content (television, netflix, movies). It will probably also grow in monetization faster than short-form video content (TikTok), at least in the >30 year old demographic (and the purchasing power of older consumers helps it to win in total monetization). I predict this trend will accelerate over the next 2 years for many kinds of content, and
This is an easy prediction because to a great degree it’s already happened. People like Joe Rogan with audience of over 11 million per episode clearly are major media properties on the high end, but even for a mid-list author, the amount of work that goes into creating a book, given the success of most published books, could produce a podcast and achieve both greater listenership and make more money. Podcasts have a very easy monetization model, with somewhat more trivial to skip or block or ignore inline ads, usually read by the podcast host, compared to banner ads on web pages (which I rarely see thanks to Brave Browser) or other forms of advertising.
To me, the economics and reach aren’t even the most important part. Podcasts (and newsletters like substack, with easily self-hosted alternatives) are the closest thing we have to the pre-Facebook Internet — largely self-hosted or commodity platform hosted, censorship-resistant, decentralized, monetized through diverse channels, and gatekeeper-free. Apple doesn’t gatekeep (much; there are some they ban), and doesn’t charge a 30% tax. Most podcast players can take a raw RSS feed URL and work fine, and there are adequate but not great ways to do subscriber-specific podcasts with authentication. The infrastructure isn’t perfect (especially for listener feedback), but it’s a whole lot better than most of the rest of today’s commercial Internet. There’s a vibrant player/client ecosystem as well, across platforms. I like the Overcast App on iOS, particularly for inter-word silence reduction and overall speedup, giving an effective 3-4x listening speed on much content.
For a while, podcasts escaped calls for censorship as much due to lack of simple search and discovery as due to intentional choices or market structure. It was much harder to search millions of hours of audio for thoughtcrime than it was to google search text. To some extent machine transcription “fixes” this, but the precedent of podcasts being an open platform without a small number of gatekeepers already exists.
The impediment to a podcast completely replacing (audiobooks initially) books is probably the reputation halo of being a “published author”, and the ability to reference a “printed” “book” as some kind of authoritative reference on a topic, vs. an ongoing podcast or even specific episode. There is some precedent here with journals (on technical topics) and serialized fiction (which for a while were much more commercially successful in many genres than printed novels), and maybe even parallels with television vs. movies for episodic vs. one-and-done content. The easy win for podcasts is probably interview format, current events, and other highly timely information. Substack, Apple, and others are experimenting with machine speech of articles, lowering the bar to creating content.
I’m even more excited about genuinely interactive ways to communicate many of the remaining topics — hand someone a model (spreadsheet, workbook, or some online service), make various arguments using that model, and let the reader manipulate it himself, inspect the data, etc. Unclear how this would be distributed or modeled, but something like Our World In Data is a glimpse of how things could be. I’ve never really understood the fetishization of books as physical objects — for me, it’s about information exchange.