A look back at 20 years of podcasting
Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now-catchall term for digital audio shows goes back to the Apple iPod. And it’s been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes.
“We’re going to list thousands of podcasts and you’ll be able to click on them, download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes,” said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference.
So, what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning, and where might it go from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty asked Nicholas Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:
Nicholas Quah: My understanding is that there wasn’t really a business model. A lot of the early podcasts were just people making stuff and posting stuff around. And the analogy of the blog that rose with the rise of Google AdSense, these spam ads that you see on the internet, that was the early form of monetizing blogs and websites. There wasn’t quite anything like that for podcasts at the time. That being said, this was mid-2000s. And late-2000s era also gave rise to “Dear Brothers” podcast networks, and they tried to sell ads directly into the show. But, of course, the big hurdle, is that nobody quite knew what a podcast was. It was a little hard to prove what the audience size was. For advertisers, it’s difficult to get a sense that if I paid you X amount of money to get X amount of impressions, can I trust your impressions? All of that was very difficult early on.
Meghan McCarty Carino: I want to talk about some of the technical changes that kind of have changed the podcasting game — you know, the ability to stream high quality audio and the ability to have really good analytics of when people are downloading [and] listening. How did that kind of data start to affect podcasting?
Quah: Well, we’re in the middle of still feeling that out. So if you ask anybody who works in the business, or anybody who covers this space, a constant refrain is that metrics in podcasting is still kind of all over the place. And I want to sort of lay the context here in a sense that this was part of the point, originally, of podcasting: the whole notion that it was sort of freestanding also meant that it was, yes, harder to sort of understand and study in terms of how many people actually download it and listened, and to what extent did they listen to each individual episode. But that created a system in which nobody could govern the destiny or the trajectory of the medium. To answer your question, [let’s] quickly go through what happened between 2014 and the pandemic. There was this huge influx of investors and money and new players. Lots of people were triggered into the idea of, there’s something here. People are talking about podcasting. We’re going to make a ton of it.
McCarty Carino: Might call that the bubble era.
Quah: Yes, it was definitely a bubbly atmosphere. Very frothy atmosphere. This influx of money also drew increased attention from technology companies, and advertisers had this need. They were like, if we’re going to pay X amount of money to have our ads in your show, we want to know how many people actually heard the ad, who is listening to the ad — like, is the ad being efficient? So this is the tension that drove a lot of the podcasting story during that era. A lot of people in the podcasting space looked around and sort of saw what broader digital media companies experienced through the wave, when Facebook was a major player, when Google and social media companies kind of dictated the rise and falls of different media companies. And with podcasting, it just was a couple years delayed through that process. So the major play to think about introducing analytics at a very high level is Spotify. They jumped into the space in 2019. If the majority of all podcast listeners are listening on Spotify, then they can provide a picture of the metrics more, with more granularity, and hopefully develop a very tight relationship with advertisers within the medium. So that’s a big force that’s happening. That happened between 2019 through to the pandemic. Today it’s a little different, so we can talk a little bit about that, because at some point over the past couple years, YouTube came into play.
McCarty Carino: Yeah, so YouTube is now the primary place that people access podcasts. How has that changed the landscape?
Quah: So it’s changing. It’s changing the landscape, in the sense of introducing a very complicated, what I would say is, an identity crisis in podcasting. So as you alluded to earlier, podcasting went through this really big, bubbly period. It’s a lot of money coming in, a lot of venture capital, a lot of speculative money, a lot of shows that cost way more than they were able to make the money back. And at the beginning of pandemic, the bubble inflated further because a lot of media companies and film, television companies couldn’t produce their work. And so a lot of celebrities turned to podcasting that drew for their attention. But there were several major economic changes over the course of the pandemic, and that caused the bubble to burst. Interest rates went up, and it was us understanding that tech companies and investment firms were now within an incentive structure where they needed to show revenue and profit as opposed to just growth. This was true for the tech scene writ large, and it was true for the podcast scene specifically. So this caused a massive pop, or deflation — lots of podcast shows got canceled, a lot of podcast companies laid off staff. And what seemed to be of success … often talky, low overhead shows, interviews, chat, hosted by somebody who’s already famous … there was a grasping for anything that could provide a sense of stability and growth, any sense of financial excitement, [then] enters YouTube.
McCarty Carino: Right, so video podcasting on YouTube has kind of become the standard now. But why is that? Why are podcasters leaning into YouTube now, even though it’s been around a long time?
Quah: My understanding is that it was a response from a lot of podcast companies going, where is the next frontier growth? We should put our podcast on internet, because a lot of it is just chat. A lot of it is people talking in front of mic with a video camera going in front of them, like, slap it up on YouTube and reach a wider audience that’s already baked in through the algorithm that YouTube has. As a result, a lot of new audiences who are being introduced to podcasting for the first time understand it as a video-first medium. They kind of equate the word podcasting with YouTube with video, which is not necessarily the case of what it was in terms of its identity over the past 20 years, and that’s why we’re currently in the middle of a space where it’s a little tricky to talk about podcasts in terms of what it actually is, because it’s a concept at this point in time.
McCarty Carino: What new innovations are you watching as we move past 20 years of podcasting into hopefully the future?
Quah: Innovation is a really interesting word to use here, because we’re in the middle of a very complicated identity crisis for podcasts, like, is it video, audio? So to the extent that I’m looking at innovation moving forward, I’m looking more in terms of a conceptual innovation of, can we reframe or be more granular and specific with what exactly we’re talking about with this medium? Maybe it means that we just don’t use the word podcast anymore — it’s all pulling back together into this giant blob of content, and podcasting is not part of that blob.
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