IT IS hard to identify the moment when podcasting took off, because it keeps having them. In June last year Barack Obama showed up at a Californian man’s garage to tape a podcast (“WTF with Marc Maron”) while “Serial”, a podcast series about disputed real-life stories launched in 2014, has surpassed 100m downloads.
Listeners will be forgiven if they feel they have heard this story before. Podcasts were meant to have arrived a decade ago. But they remain a tiny market for advertisers—$50m to $80m annually in America compared with $16 billion on terrestrial radio. Can podcasts finally hit the big time as a business?
There are reasons for optimism. The audience has grown quickly. In 2006 11% of Americans aged 12 or over had listened to a podcast; by 2015 that had tripled, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital (an ad-technology firm). Technology is pushing podcasts into listeners’ ears. In 2014 Apple put a podcast app on the iPhone that is all but indelible. In 2015 Spotify and Pandora added podcasts to their music-streaming services. As increasing numbers of cars get wireless-internet connections, that too should...Continue reading
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