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Podcasters love regular listeners.
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And regular listeners love their podcasts.
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Dependability on both sides has been a driving and differentiating
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factor for podcasting.
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But is that still a good thing?
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Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.
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Okay, I promise this is about podcasting, but first I've got to talk about books
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and television series and movies.
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And then I'm going to talk about podcasting, I promise.
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See, in the last fifteen months, I've read thirteen different books.
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I read a lot of books.
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I mean, almost every night I read for thirty minutes to an hour.
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And when one book ends, I go get another book.
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You know, with millions of choices to read there's never a time when
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I can't find anything to read.
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I also watch a lot of television shows.
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I mean, since I work from home, I tend to watch an episode of something
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when I'm on break for lunch.
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And when a series that I'm watching ends, I go get another TV series.
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Hundreds, or maybe even thousands of shows to watch, there's never a time when
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I can't find anything I want to watch.
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I also watch a lot of movies.
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Evenings, the weekends, and also between what I have on the numerous
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services that I subscribe to, and also, finally, now movie theaters, I
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have enough choices so that when I'm in the mood for the next movie I want
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to watch, there's never a time when I can't find another movie to watch.
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And this isn't an uncommon experience.
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At least not for those of us that live in developed nations.
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There's a lot of content, more content than any one person can
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hope to consume on their own.
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And yes, access can be, and is, an issue.
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A particular title that you might want to consume may not be in the
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libraries which you have access to.
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And yeah, search and discovery within those growing libraries of
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content is oftentimes a big mess.
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But still, we keep returning to those wells, actual libraries,
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marketplaces, streaming services, forty-screen cinema down the street.
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We lap up the content, all those different titles, all the time.
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I read fifteen different books in the last fifteen months.
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Netflix says I watched twenty-two different series and sixteen different
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movies, and Netflix is just one of the services I've subscribed to.
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And if that sounds like a lot to you, it's really not all that different from the
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average, but it's a lot more consuming of titles than we see in podcasting.
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Why is that?
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I have a hypothesis.
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Every year, Edison Research puts out their Infinite Dial report.
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One of the data points presented in that report is the number of podcasts listened
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to by the people in the last week.
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Now, that number is right around eight or five, depending on how you want to count.
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And how you count's not important to this particular thing I'm trying to get
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to, so I'm just going to skip past it and not make you do any of the math.
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Actually, I will make you do some math.
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Because if we take that five or that eight, and we extrapolate that weekly
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listening for the entire year, we get 260 or 416, and those are much bigger numbers
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than I just talked about for the books, television shows, and movies that I watch.
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But actually, it's not.
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Those big numbers are podcast episodes consumed, not specific podcast titles.
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And while serialized, self-contained podcasts are growing in popularity,
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there's no doubt that the episodic, ongoing podcast, that is the same
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episodes or actually different episodes, but the same type of content
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week after week, that's the norm.
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Or more frequently than that.
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I mean, look no further than this show with nearly 600 episodes I put out
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over the last 4.5 years, as an example.
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There's no break.
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It's generally accepted that you can count the number of podcasts the average person
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is actively listening to on one hand.
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And if most of those podcasts are episodic and ongoing, then there isn't really much
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room for them to listen to anything else.
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Episodic podcasts don't have the terminal nature of books,
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television series, or movies.
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They don't have a finite end point at which the listeners now have reached the
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conclusion and are then forced to hunt for something else to fill their time.
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No, not in podcasting.
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In podcasting, they just keep going.
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The shows just keep going.
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For months on end or years on end.
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And yeah, sure, many listeners are going to grow bored and drop out.
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Some are just going to dip in and out when they get what they need and then move on.
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But a lot won't.
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A lot will hang out and keep consuming that content, inhibiting their
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ability to find and discover new content because they don't really
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have the room for the new content.
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The churn rate is something businesses try to keep low.
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Podcasters, too, for obvious reasons.
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I mean, we want to keep our listeners.
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We want to grow our listener base.
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If we can give our people what they need with our show and then keep giving
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them that content so that they never have to leave us and go find something
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else, why not lock them in place?
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Now, if there's a point to this notion, this notion that would not leave my
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brain last night so you get to deal with it today, sorry about that, it's
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this, podcasting is different from the other sorts of media we humans consume.
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The other forms, they've all adapted to provide their consumers
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a "get this and then get this when you're done" content fountain.
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Podcasting hasn't.
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Podcasting, at least for a very large segment of the podcast
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consumers, is really more about "get this and never leave" model.
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But I wonder for how long?
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Maybe we'll learn more about that when the next Infinite Dial by
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Edison Research comes out next week.
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And maybe that will show us some of the shifts in behavior consumers are
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having right now, which might cause us, the creators of that content,
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to also shift our assumptions and our behaviors, as well.
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With that, I shall be back directly with yet another Podcast Pontifications.
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Cheers!
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Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra.
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He's on a mission to make podcasting better.
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Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes
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section of your podcast listening app.
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A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at
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podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected
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transcript, both created by Allie Press.
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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media.
