Podcasts — a sad story of inevitable commodification

Around the middle of 2017, I received a call from the editor of the Lifestyle section of the Sunday Times. He wanted me to write a feature about podcasts. His rationale was that podcasts, a fairly recent arrival on the media landscape, had just started knocking on the door of wide public consciousness. The editor, rather presciently, was sure that the little yapping puppy was soon going to be top dog. 

I had just written a novel with a podcaster as its antihero protagonist so I had done some research. I agreed with the editor. Podcasts would be under the global media spotlight in no time at all. 

It was not as though it was a new media technology, however. I wrote at the time: 

“Podcasts started in earnest in 2001, brought to the world by Los Angeles programmer Dave Winer and media personality Adam Curry (although there are many other claimants). But it was an oddity, attended to by geeks and a couple of visionaries and tinkerers and early adopters, until the confluence of iPhones and cars with Bluetooth, sometime in the late 2000s.”

It was a 2014 US podcast called Serial, produced by Sarah Koenig, which changed everything. It was a true crime series, and it was downloaded 230 million times worldwide. The monarchs of the great media empires all blinked and said WTF. Those numbers were usually reserved for megahit movies and music releases. And so it happened that the capital available to this nascent industry quickly turned from a trickle into a mighty river, damaging large swathes of other media in the competition for money and attention.  

Which brings me to a feature in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend, which revealed some startling statistics.

Who among us has ever heard of Alex Cooper? Certainly not me nor anyone in my social bubble, at least, not until the last couple of days. Cooper’s podcast is called Call Her Daddy. It has been described as “female locker room talk”, because it originally dispensed advice about female sexuality and relationships in, erm, very unfiltered language. 

It has now expanded its remit to discussing broader issues relating to young women, but the vivacious 29-year-old Ms Cooper has retained the edgy style and attitude that won her an audience reputed to be 10 million listeners per week. Those ten million are a closely targeted group of women ranging from their late teens into their early thirties, all of whom are interested in information (and some gossip) around sexuality, relationships and the like, presented with humour and elan. 

That, if you’ll excuse the sexual reference, is an advertiser’s wet dream. 

When Cooper inked a $60-million deal with Spotify in 2021, eyebrows shot up. That was then. Her new deal, with broadcaster Sirius XM, is reputed to be in the region of $100-million. Let me say that again. One hundred million dollars. For a podcast series. No wonder she is being called the Oprah Winfrey of podcasting.

Alex Cooper is not even in the top four podcasts (she is number seven). At the top of the pile, by a long shot, is Joe Rogan, whose $250-million deal with Spotify is likely to increase substantially in the next round. Then there are Travis and Jason Kelce. They are number four in downloads and, if you are not in the US, you have probably never heard of them either, because they are football players. 

I was interested in comparing the listenership of podcasts and radio, given that they compete for the same eardrums. Radio in the US has many more listeners (more than 250 million per week versus podcasts’ 100 million) but they are spread over 15,000 stations, so that statistic doesn’t help. This next figure gives a better picture: the most popular syndicated radio show in the US was, until his death in 2021, the three-hour Rush Limbaugh Show with 15 million listeners. The Joe Rogan Show (often of similar length) also draws about 15 million listeners. It’s neck and neck.

The Wall Street Journal article goes on to excavate further interesting threads about the industry. The increasing incidence of podcasts dual-streamed with video versions on YouTube for those who prefer to watch. The increase of prestige brand in-stream advertising. The merch. The roadshows. The live podcasts. Freemium models. Subscription models (Sam Harris’s Mindscape comes to mind). The podcaster-as-superstar events (throwing the opening ball at an important baseball match, for instance). 

And, importantly, the stringent new conditions being set by the capital risk takers – if the audience starts to drop, so does the money.  

The settling down and maturation of this new media platform has produced the inevitable – a few fat hits and famine everywhere else. Here is the shocking evidence: there are 450,000 podcasts and only 25 of them account for half of all the money made by the industry. This makes me uncomfortable – it smacks of the sort of commoditisation that emerges when big money, big brands and big personalities surreptitiously herd us towards their pre-selected bestseller racks. 

When I started listening to podcasts in the Noughties I frolicked in a manageably small garden burgeoning with colourful blooms to pick. It now feels paralysingly vast. There are fewer than 10 podcasts to which I am loyal, and I don’t have the courage or the time to seek out other needles in this massive haystack. 

Too much choice seems to be a problem when commerce and art intersect. The same has happened to books, movies and TV shows. The media owners concentrate on the sure things in order to reduce risk and uncertainty. Then throw money at marketing and big-dollar deals. 

 We are all a little poorer for it. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in South Africa and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.