Part of that is a lack of a focus on podcasting. Serial drove a lot of interest, and that momentum faded with no obvious replacement. Podcasts were something folks made time for on their commutes and during their workouts. When folks started working from home en masse, they had less and less reason to listen.
Listenership fell for shows that have remained consistent. Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019. And that's without changing cadence.
Your customers' data may reflect that, but industry data shows that podcasting is still growing steadily. In their more recent (2022) report, Edison Research notes, "Monthly podcast listening saw growth year-over-year among those age 35-54, as 43% are now monthly podcast listeners, up from 39% in 2021."
> Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019.
Shows fail. There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
The number of people listening isn't a proxy for _how much_ they are listening. Nor is the number of times they listen per month. What matters is the number of hours listened.
It's also the case that with more shows, there's a dilution of listeners' time. There's a pretty firm cap on the number of hours of podcasts that people can listen to. It's easy for folks to dig their heels in on one or two favorite shows and stop listening to the rest of the ones they had previously been interested in.
> There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
And there are countless more podcasts whose listenerships have shrunk substantially since 2019.
Yes, podcasts (and YouTube channels, and blogs, etc.) fail all the time. I'm not disputing it, but it's not a new phenomenon.
Do you think QCode has a viable business model? Producing scripted podcasts that are designed to be trial runs for TV shows/films?
There's no reason to assume podcasting would behave differently: if there's compelling content, people will go out of their way to consume it. The trick is making audio that people will want to listen to.