podcasts: past, present and future

The opportunity for podcasts will get much, much bigger

Podcast revenues are expected to exceed $2B in 2022. YouTube, on the other hand, generated nearly $29B in video ad revenue in 2021 alone. In other words, the video market is vastly bigger than the podcast market. As more and more podcasters turn to video, more revenue will be unlocked for... See more

Will podcasts go away?

In a world where every podcast includes video, every platform supports video, and video-first shows are more engaging for users (and therefore more valuable for creators), it’s fair to wonder if people will stop making “podcasts” as we know them today. Today a podcast is an episode of audio content featuring people talking.... See more

The podcast Kiln, for example, is an "audio horror story" featuring Scandinavian mythological creatures, but it’s geo-restricted: you can only listen to it in certain Swedish forests.

And I’m discovering other ways to ease myself back in gently, such as podcasts about music. Rob Harvilla’s exquisite 60 Songs That Explain The 90s has just returned with a new colon: The 00s, which is satisfying my nostalgia RDA but also reminding me why new music was so important to me back then, and why it still could be now.

Because as a reader... See more

Podcasting is a medium made for this kind of storytelling; if journalism is, as someone once said, “the first draft of history”, then maybe podcasting is the second. As a medium, it has a wider intellectual bandwidth than broadcasting, which has to address mass audiences, whereas podcasting can serve niche interests and make more assumptions about... See more