| Meanwhile: I’m continuing to take letters for the mailbag. Send me your questions, prompts, hot takes, and opinions at nicholas.quah@vulture.com. |
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 |  | | Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Getty Images | | | | In a former life, I paid close attention to podcast industry-related things like audience surveys, the intricacies of iOS updates on downloads, Spotify’s latest doohickeys, and what advertisers think. Much less so these days; there are other things cornering my time, and there are now plenty of other fine people covering the beat. |
| To brush off some cobwebs and brush up on the latest picture, I called up Hot Pod’s Ariel Shapiro to tell me how I should think about things. |
| Nick Quah: As I understand it, the new Infinite Dial report indicates that podcast audiences are still up — in fact, the growth in monthly listening from last year seems to be the largest bump since before the pandemic. I find this fairly surprising, given the general languor around the biz. Help me understand how to approach this picture. |
| Ariel Shapiro: So, the reason you’re seeing this discrepancy between Edison’s findings and downloads is because what Edison does is a survey — it’s not straight data. It’s based on interviews and respondent feedback. The Infinite Dial study is considered the gold-standard, and it’s really reliable, but these are two completely different buckets of information. You need both to understand the current state of podcasting. |
| Downloads are, of course, notoriously unreliable as a direct metric because they’re so easily manipulated. (Even though they’re still the thing ad rates are based on.) Downloads don’t necessarily correlate with listeners. Now, the data we get from Edison isn’t foolproof, but as opposed to the experience of any one individual show or network, it gives us a bird’s eye view on how many people are engaging with podcasting on a regular basis. |
| The numbers going up is not surprising, because from what I’ve heard — and I’m sure from you’ve heard this as well — more and more people are listening to podcasts. It’s just not necessarily the kind of podcasts that were once the core of the industry. |
| Among other things, you’re talking about stuff that’s also derived from YouTube. |
| And we’re not even necessarily talking about audio, for that matter. |
| Right. Take Tucker Carlson’s show, for example. On the one hand, it’s all video. He’s a TV guy. He’s on screen. On the other hand, the show’s also on the podcast charts. When it’s on X, you can see a microphone in front of his face, so it codes that you’re watching something that’s a conversation in a particular style that we understand to be a podcast. |
| So “podcast” is more of an aesthetic than an actual technical definition these days. |
| I guess. Once you start including those different platforms as podcast platforms as well, things can get pretty confusing. Not every video you see on YouTube is going to be a podcast, and not every podcast is going to be on YouTube. |
| Let’s go back to the report for a second: there’s a line in conclusion that says “don’t confuse download accounts for listening.” I imagine that might be a little challenging for people on the advertising side. What’s the conversation currently on solving that problem of the gap between what we generally know about audience size and how that audience can be actionably measured for ads? |
| So, the main issue is that there still isn’t a better metric than downloads, though the download metric itself is getting better. Think of what recently happened with iOS17: it used to be that if you subscribed to a podcast and left it for a while — maybe a month, a year — when you came back to the podcast, the app would download all the episodes that were published in the intervening period. So that counts a lot of people who kinda subscribe to a show but don’t necessarily check in all the time. Apple implemented a change that doesn’t count those any more, and creators ended up seeing a sizable decline in downloads pretty much across the board. Even shows you would consider being more fool-proof; that is, more established ones that publish really regularly. |
| When we had Ira Glass at Hot Pod Summit recently, he said they were down about 20%, which is about what many other people were experiencing. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people are listening to This American Life. It just means we’re getting a clearer picture of how many people are actually listening. That’s a good thing in the long run, because you have a more accurate picture. But in the short term, on top of everything else that’s happened over the past few years, it’s not great. No one wants to see their downloads go down. And advertisers are not happy they’ve been paying for downloads that weren’t really translating into listens. |
| Then again, some would say advertisers have long been underpricing this medium that’s long associated with deep audience engagement. |
| Maybe. One person I talked to was like, “We could charge more because it’s more accurate now!” Which is a really rosy view on this, I think. I don’t know if advertisers are gonna go along with that so quick. |
| Right now, people are figuring things out on a case-by-case basis. “Do you owe me these impressions next month based on what I paid last month?” That kind of thing. But the fact is: Everyone’s in the same boat. It’s not like anyone network or show has to play catch-up against everyone else. This is an industry-wide issue. |
| Again, I think this exposes what everyone already knew: the download is a finicky metric. It’s still useful, because it still gives us a picture of listenership even if it’s not exact. That’s why it’s also helpful to have the Edison survey data, which is just another piece of the puzzle. |
| Last thing. Is it time to unbundle the concept of a “podcast”? I’m just thinking about how, between the download metric still being tremendously iffy and the increasing prominence of YouTube within the ecosystem, it feels like we’re in the middle of a category collapse that might not ultimately be useful to everyone involved. |
| I don’t know if that’s a good idea, at least from a branding perspective. One of the bigger bright spots in Edison’s survey data is that you saw listening go up across age ranges. So you can say “podcast” and for the most part, people have a familiarity with that word. It might be a show you download through your Apple Podcast app that’s forty-five minutes long. It might be a show you watch on YouTube. Last year, we were talking a lot about audiobooks and how those were also starting to blur the lines a bit as they get shorter and sound more like podcasts. So people are coming into this creative ecosystem in all these different ways, and I wouldn’t want to lose the overarching branding just yet. I know that’s a very corporate way of thinking about it, but I’d stick with “podcasts” as long as the word is giving people in-roads. Because what replaces it? |
| It’s a good question. I guess the way I’m thinking about this is that, say, if I wanted to start a podcast business right now, what exactly am I starting? Am I starting a venture that’s focused on audio-only audiences and makes money through audio advertising products, or am I starting a business that also needs to meet YouTube economics? How would I square those different audience and advertising needs? |
| That’s fair. Those are two totally separate advertising buckets, because YouTube is a system that doesn’t directly interact with the podcast advertising ecosystem. And there is a trade-off, right? Because ad rates are higher in classic RSS podcasting, while it’s significantly lower with YouTube but the idea is, well, you’re supposed to get more reach, right? And so you maybe make up for it with that. |
| I suppose. It feels to me like the buckets are “do you want fewer high-quality impressions?” (original recipe podcasting) or “do you want more low-quality impressions?” (YouTube). There’s a real tension between those two things, and building a business across those two models sounds like it would suck. |
| That’s what a lot of companies are doing right now. They’re doing both, and it’s not elegant. Maybe there will be a way to unify. Maybe you’ll have some that are just picking one. “I’m just an audio podcast.” Or “I’m only on YouTube” such that you would be losing the opportunity to reach people on Spotify and Apple — and there are plenty of people on Spotify and Apple — but you figure it’s worth your time to do it that way. So yeah, it’s not a cohesive system yet. |
| ➽ I may groan about the death-commodifying nature of so many true crime show conceits, but I have my weaknesses. A show description that caught my eye recently: “The real estate market has never been hotter. Houses sell as soon as they’re listed. Bidding wars lead to all cash deals far above the asking price. But there is one kind of property that often sits on the market for years, no matter how much of a bargain it seems to be.” The show is called, can you believe it, Murder Homes, and it does exactly what you think it does. Not to be mistaken, of course, with an actual Quibi show called Murder House Flip. |
| ➽ Over at The New Yorker, Sarah Larson writes about three shows tackling right-wing militias: Chameleon: The Michigan Plot, If All Else Fails, and an episode off Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart (which you can find on my Best Of list, of course). |
| ➽ Yup, the wait for the LSU-Iowa rematch was worth it. |
| And that’s a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We’re back next week, but in the meantime… |
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