Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 140, published November 14, 2017.
Hello from Chicago, where I’m writing this in the lovely Hearken offices. Much thanks to the team for letting me in from the Midwestern cold.
The voice of Vox. We now know who is going to host the upcoming Vox daily news podcast: the Canadian-born Sean Rameswaram. A veteran WNYC staffer, his tenure includes work on the Kurt Andersen-led Studio 360 while the show was still at the station and, more recently, as a reporter on Radiolab’s More Perfect. Rameswaram has long exhibited considerable ambition to lead his own program: he hosted the Studio 360 spin-off podcast Sideshow, served as a guest host on a season of the CBC’s Podcast Playlist, and put himself in the running to take over the popular Canadian culture program Q in the post-Ghomeshi era. (He would eventually be beaten out by the rapper Shadrach Kabango.)
Rameswaram now finds himself at the front of Vox’s latest, and splashiest, foray into audio with a daily news podcast at a time when the genre is truly heating up. Some things to watch: How will the show differentiate itself from the New York Times’ The Daily? How will Vox carve out its own piece of the daily news podcast listening audience? And how will Rameswaram fare as the Barbaro alternative? Will we ever find the time to Feel. All. This. News?
He will move to DC for the gig, where he will be stationed in Vox’s core newsroom. The press release notes that he will eventually be joined by a staff of five. The show, whatever it will be called, is scheduled to launch early next year.
The most engaged. This morning, the Knight Foundation published a report — conducted by Edison Research — that identifies a specific subset within the podcast listening population: what it’s calling “super listeners,” referring to exceptionally engaged consumers of informative digital audio content.
Among the observed characteristics include:
The report also explores the relationship between this listener subset and public media. The findings are intriguing, with the study finding that: “Despite the fact that self-reported radio listening is down with these respondents as a result of podcast listening, two-thirds indicated that they have listened to their local public radio station in the last month… Nearly one-third indicated that they had donated money in the last year to their local public radio station, and 28% had donated to a podcast or radio program directly.” But the study also discovered that there isn’t necessarily a universal “halo effect” for public media podcasts: 51 percent said they like public and nonpublic media podcasts “equally,” and another 15 percent indicated that they “couldn’t tell the difference.” From this, the report suggests that while this listening group has strong loyalty to public media at this point in time, it does not say very much about how that relationship will hold over time.
The report doesn’t quite explore how big or prevalent the “super listener” demographic is in relation to the general listening population, and it should be further noted that the report has a distinct public media focus in its framing and methodology. (Which is to say, as much as this might be identification of a subset within the overall listening population, we might also be looking at a subset that may well be specific to the publishers involved in the study.) I reached out to the Knight Foundation for its take on just how big this group might be, and this is what Sam Gill, the VP of communities and impact, wrote back:
Good question, however it’s outside the scope of the study. The study focused on survey data from more than 28,000 listeners in order to paint a compelling picture of this audience. Respondents were identified through audio callouts (solicitations typically done by the hosts) on podcasts created by six networks: NPR, PRI, APM, WBUR, PRX, and Gimlet. The on-air promotion and the fact that these organizations shared their data, makes the study particularly unique.
The rest of the methodology is explained in further depth in the report’s appendix. Anyway, do check out the whole thing, as one imagines that this is a specific consumer type that publishers can identify, build for, and activate differently. Speaking of which, the report actually pairs pretty well with this next item…
Podfasting. And we’re back onto the Great Speed-Listening Debate. (See the Chicago Tribune, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, The Ringer, and for older takes, The Atlantic and The Verge.)
BuzzFeed’s Doree Shafrir pubbed a piece over the weekend about people who listen to podcasts at 2x speed (and beyond). It’s a fantastic, fascinating read, not least for the coining of the term “podfaster.” Article skimmers — a species genealogically related to the podfaster, really — should catch two things:
(1) The question of how speed-listening may affect advertising impressions was touched upon, with Midroll’s Lex Friedman providing what seems to be an expected answer. To quote the chunk:
Podfasters could potentially be more valuable to advertisers because they may be less likely to skip ads… ‘I think people like me are less likely to skip ads because they’re wasting less time when they’re listening,’ [Friedman] said. He added that he’s never heard an advertiser complain about podfasters. ‘I really do genuinely believe that if it’s having any effect on ads, it’s making them more likely to be heard. Now they’ll pay attention to the ads. I don’t think it harms the ads’ efficacy.’
We’ll see.
(2) In much the way that the Knight report identifies the subset of podcast “super listeners,” Shafrir’s piece sheds some light on what might be an even more granular sub-group: podcast completists, for whom the ability to speed-listen is essential, and whose relationship to a given show is perhaps the most profound.
So, the thing I’ve always found interesting about this debate is how it highlights this tension in the relationship between producer intent and listener autonomy, between sender and receiver. We’ve seen different iterations of this struggle play out in other mediums, like the notion of watching feature films on smartphones (“Get real,” says David Lynch), or reading novels by having sentences be flashed rapidly before your eyeballs. Shafrir’s piece underscores, to me anyway, just how little direct power producers have over the listening experience. Perhaps it’s a situation where, much like how producers had to develop tricks to catch radio listeners to stop turning the dial, they’ll have to now figure out ways to get them to slow down.
As a side note, I guess we have a partial answer to that old New Yorker cartoon nut: “I feel like everybody’s podcasting and nobody’s podlistening.”
A test case. So you know that whole “convergence of audio media” idea that I’ve been yammering on about since last year? I think we have our first major test case, with some pretty interesting theoretical questions to boot.
Here’s the news: IHeartMedia has broken into the second spot of the Podtrac ranker for the month of October, but the development comes with a rather interesting caveat: its portfolio apparently contains over five hundred shows. The platform — or “platisher,” if I may bring the term back up, given its voluminous original audio programming — reached slightly under 9 million monthly unique US listeners and over 33.5 million unique global downloads over a whopping 525 shows.
IHeartMedia ranks second to NPR, which reaches over 16 million monthly unique U.S. users but on the strength of only 41 programs. (The company with the next largest show portfolio is ESPN, with 79 programs that reach over 4.8 million unique U.S. users.) IHeartMedia’s stats are reminiscent of the Podtrac adventures of another traditional radio-originated podcast publisher: CBS, which last listed on the Podtrac ranker on the ninth spot back in June by reaching over 1.7 million unique US listeners across a whopping 417 shows.
Over Twitter, iHeartRadio SVP of podcasting Chris Peterson informed me that the platisher expects to add more active shows to the Podtrac ranker — therefore further pumping up the numbers — and that they will be looking to launch more in the months to come. When asked to clarify the shape of the portfolio, he explained that the 500-plus show number includes both programs that were created specifically as podcasts along with programs that were radio shows later repurposed for on-demand. It should be further clarified that iHeartMedia’s Podtrac numbers do not include counts of third-party podcasts that are consumed off its platform. As a reminder, NPR is an example of a publisher that also distributes its podcasts on iHeartMedia.
So, what’s the big thought bubble here? We have a situation where a traditionally linear-oriented company has leveraged the sheer scale of its inventory — largely pulled from its sprawling broadcast infrastructure that’s been developed over the years — to produce a performance measure that sends it up to the second spot of the only public-facing podcast ranker that exists at this point in time.
Here’s the key question to ask: are we looking at a truly apples-to-apples situation here? Which is to say, can iHeartMedia’s on-demand audio inventory be meaningfully evaluated within the same value system as every other publisher on that list, from NPR to HowStuffWorks to The New York Times?
From one angle, you could very well argue in the affirmative: that a listener is a listener is a listener, no matter how they are accessed, touched, or engaged with. On the other hand, it could be equally posited that not all listening experiences are the same or should be evaluated in the same manner. That a huge part of the value narrative around podcasts in the first place is based on a certain idea of the relationship between the listener and the show, and on a given podcast company’s ability to produce shows of depth and scale. The findings from the Knight Foundation report, and the further identification of the podcast completist, gives more weight to this latter position.
We should ask if a publisher — sorry, a “platisher” — like iHeartMedia is even playing the same game as everybody else on the ranker. Does it merely represents one strategy out of many within the podcast industry — that is, the move to accrue the largest amount of ad inventory through the aggressive bundling of small shows in order to unlock podcast advertising dollars, as opposed to producing a much smaller portfolio of big shows with big communities around each individual operation? (To phrase this line of inquiry in another way: what, exactly, is the product being sold, and are they the same?)
I’m pretty Switzerland on this, and besides, it’s not as if it’s going to come down to me to figure it out. That kind of taxonomical work should come down to the publishers themselves, working out the terms of the market that they’re playing. Or perhaps it comes down more to Podtrac itself, functioning as a value arbiter in the space.
In any case, we’re looking at a minor clash in context with big-time ramifications. “We are thrilled to be leading the industry in terms of podcast content creation, joining the ranks of NPR for top podcast publishers, and proving that broadcast radio is a major driver for the podcast space,” according to the press release announcing the achievement. Indeed, I suppose that’s one way to skin a cat.
Full service. “I see the industry as something that’s going to stratify in the next five years,” said Rose Reid, the cofounder of a new podcast agency that I’m going to tell you about after I land this opening quote. “When we get analytics, when we see more money going to the top ten percent of producers — and I’m thinking about how to position producers within those changes.”
Reid is telling me about just one of the roles that ARC, a new agency she launched earlier this month with the independent producer Alex Kapelman (Pitch, The Decision), is meant to play in the industry. They bill ARC as a “full-service creative podcast agency,” and when I asked them what that meant, they broke it down into three component parts.
“We’re at this intersection of being a production company, much like Pineapple Street and Transmitter Media, but also an advertising and talent management agency,” Kapelman explained. Which is to say, they make podcasts for other networks, they produce branded content for podcast advertisers, and they work with producers to improve their lot in the market. That said, they’re keeping an open mind. “We don’t want to limit ourselves in the services that we provide.”
It’s a fairly broad value proposition, but I suppose it affords a flexibility to better maneuver within an emerging podcast studio-agency that’s particularly dense as it pertains to shops that focus on editorial production, whether for brands or for bigger podcast companies like Midroll; think Pacific Content, Gimlet Creative, Panoply Custom, Pineapple Street, and so on. Within this bucket, the primary differentiating factor tends to be a given team’s core creative value, but the ARC duo attempts to articulate a more strategy and planning-oriented value-add. “Take what Gimlet Creative did with Tinder, for example,” Reid said, by way of explaining their approach. “They made a podcast for them, and I think that’s great, but it’s just one thing to do. For us, we’d would look at how to take a narrative episodic series and make it part of a bigger integrated campaign. Maybe the Tinder show was launched as part of a bigger campaign, with live events or something, but I didn’t see it.”
(I checked in with Gimlet Creative, and a spokesperson noted that some of their branded podcasts have indeed been integrated into broader campaigns. Their Gatorade podcast, for example, was part of a larger initiative that included TV spots, digital ad buys, and a PR campaign.)
ARC’s success on that front will come down to the duo’s ability to compete for advertising clients, but it is their interest in talent management that stands out to me as especially compelling. Freelancing and independent operation makes up a big portion of life within the podcast industry, and it seems to me that much of the pedagogy around contracts and negotiations tends to happen informally between independents who’ve been there and independents who haven’t. That talent agencies like WME and UTA have been bringing their expertise into the space is a noteworthy development on this front, but I imagine you could make the argument that their focus necessarily tends to be on the top end of talent, and that those agencies have as much to learn from the ground as the other way around.
Reid was most recently a Gimlet producer, where she worked on Sampler, but she spent four years before that working at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. “At Ogilvy, I worked on contracts all the time, between talents and brands, and between subcontractors and Ogilvy,” she said. “I feel like my entire professional experience has been one huge wakeup call for how to advocate for creators.”
She describes the need for that kind of advocacy as acute. “A lot of podcasters… they’re not business people. They’re creators, and so when they get signed, they often don’t know what they’re getting themselves into,” Reid explained. “I’ve seen people get totally screwed over, mostly women. It’s very hard to negotiate for yourself when you’re operating in a vacuum, when you don’t know what your value is and what the market value is.”
I asked when we should expect operations to kick off in earnest. Reid and Kapelman tell me that they will be announcing their initial client list in the months to come. When pressed for specific names, they declined, but made a slight muscle flex. “Big brands,” Reid said. “As big as it gets.”
On a related note… Spotify rolls out a new original podcast series, The United States of Music, produced with Transmitter Media. It’s a six-part music storytelling series hosted by Sasheer Zamata.
Agency. Ever heard the phrase “nobody knows anything”? It’s an old nugget from the screenwriter William Goldman in his book about the movie business, and over the years the sentiment has been evoked to describe the state of so many things, from predictive modeling to the economy to, of course, politics. (In fact, a version of the phrase, “No One Knows Anything,” was the title of BuzzFeed’s now-defunct politics podcast.) But the notion is a little imprecise, I think. It seems more precise to say that some people know some things, and that they do so operating within a general environment where nobody knows everything.
Opportunity falls from the space between those two notions, and I think that best describes the layer of free-floating podcast studios and agencies that has been emerging steadily over the past two years. My sense is that we’re going to see more of such businesses in the coming years, as some individual talent double down on their respective skill-sets — subject expertise, say, or creative edge, or process knowledge — and depart from larger institutions, having understood from working on the inside that no one has truly built an insurmountable amount of control or edge yet, to build a business that focuses on a specific problem or gap in the space. This theoretically offers some competition to bigger and more traditionally structured organizations that publish podcasts while working to build a business at scale, as these smaller and nimbler entities can front meaningful challenges for clients with greater focus (and lower prices).
I’m tempted to think this sense of opportunity is particularly true for the podcast industry at this specific point in time, while everything is still young with no such mythology around how things work or who knows what having calcified just yet — and while the feeling that no one (or two, or three) has full control or power in the ecosystem just yet is still palpable.
Two quick expansionsStories. Crooked Media welcomes three new shows to its mix: Majority 54 with Democratic politician Jason Kander, Girls Just Wanna Have Pod with The Daily Beast’s Erin Gloria Ryan, and Keep It with The Daily Beast’s Ira Madison. The left-wing talk podcast movement continues to grow.
Secondly, the New York Times will begin testing out a special version of The Daily meant for children to listen with their parents later this month. The effort is part of a larger project to further experiment with building out news experiences targeting kids. Nieman Lab has the write-up.
In other news:
What Steve Bannon thinks about @mikiebarb's The Daily: "It's really good, it's a little @NPR-ish, but it's good."
— Amanda Williams (@amandwms) November 10, 2017
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