The Shrinking Podcast Industry

I used to listen to so many podcasts, and I would put up with the occasional ad read by the podcasters and baked into the audio

When dynamic ads became a thing in podcasts I was shocked. I thought something was wrong with my phone when I heard the first dynamic ad on Spotify. I actually questioned whether some adware had found its way onto my phone. For minutes I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That was also the day I disowned Spotify as it was a service I explicitly payed for to avoid ads.

These days the ads are everywhere and the baked in ones are longer and more frequent. I came to realise there’s fewer and fewer podcasts worth sitting through ads for. So at least in my anecdotal experience that’s why I don’t listen to podcasts as much anymore.

Well, it sounds like the numbers were just being artificially inflated in the first place. Now they're being brought down to match reality.

Side note, I don't really see how advertising can possibly be useful in this medium. We all just skip them, right? Even when I don't, I can't say I've ever purchased something mentioned on a podcast.

On the one hand, this seems like no big deal - online advertising is basically universally acknowledged to be bullshit. When you agree a deal for 10 cent CPM you don't literally think there are going to be exactly 1,000 eye balls on your advert you know there's a whole load of trash in the data you're just negotiating 10 cent per some comparable block of attention. Having said that, if that bullshit factor suddenly changes from X to Y the industry has to recalibrate and particularly they need to not have signed massive contracts which had X baked into them. I bet that has absolutely happened and it's going to absolutely screw some unlucky companies.

All of that in the context of an industry that is already under downward pressure due to the recovery from COVID and the impact of Spotify doing a SoftBank to podcasts, this comes at a really bad time.