Is Podcasting Broken?

Over-saturation, discoverability, and star names

This blog is a response to Lucas Shaw’s piece for Bloomberg, ‘Podcasting Hasn’t Produced A New Hit in Years’. I’ll synthesise his thesis but I do recommend giving his piece a read first or as well.

It’s pretty clear when a piece of industrial analysis strikes a nerve, and this week podcasting experienced that. Lucas Shaw, a Bloomberg reporter specialising on Hollywood, wrote a newsletter with the snappy ‘Podcasting Hasn’t Produced A New Hit in Years’ and basically everyone I follow in our industry had to weigh in with their take on it. Here’s mine.

Shaw basically notes concerns within the industry, particularly from Spotify, about the performance of new shows, originals and exclusives. The problem can basically be boiled down to the following paragraph:

The number of new podcasts has grown more quickly than the podcast audience, and so the number of listeners per show is going down. The list of shows competing to be that program you try on your weekend walk is longer than the backlog of TV shows you want to watch.

Regular readers of this blog will appreciate that I broadly agree with Shaw’s analysis. Podcasting does have a discoverability issue, it does have an over-saturation issue. And the result is that audiences are…