The Opportunity in Social Audio

Hardware enablers—AirPods and smart speakers—are colliding with changes in consumer behavior. On top of that, screen fatigue is drumming up demand for screen-less content. This confluence of factors is creating huge demand for “water”—for audio content and audio-first social networks.

iMessage and WhatsApp could be formidable for small-group audio channels. It’s easy to imagine Instagram or YouTube enabling creators to launch paywalled audio rooms. But the leading contender, in my mind, is Discord.

This chart also gets to the heart of the challenges of being a content publisher: publishing content is expensive, requiring a significant investment in people (journalists, videographers, artists, etc.) or a significant payout to content creators. This leads to lower margins for content publishers relative to content platforms. The New York Times ... See more

There’s a chance that none of the startups above succeeds; instead, the winner of user-generated audio might be a consumer internet incumbent.

Rather than employing or paying professional creators (the Times employs 1,600 journalists in 150 countries), platforms equip users with the tools to be content creators themselves. Across content forms, user-generated platforms are typically more scalable and capital efficient.

But for younger generations—especially those who grew up with mobile—there’s a fuzzier line between content creator and content consumer. On YouTube, about 1 in 1,000 users produced content, a huge improvement from TV; on TikTok, it’s accelerated to more like 1 in 4. For younger people, user-generated content platforms are more natural: the user ca... See more