Eric Siu breaks down three shifts reshaping podcasting: monetization moving beyond ads toward subscriptions and donations, major players like Spotify and Gimlet flooding the space, and analytics tools finally catching up to what creators actually need to track.
In this clip, we're gonna talk about the 3 biggest podcast trends for 2019 and beyond. But before we do, don't forget, if you love stuff on marketing, business, entrepreneurship, don't forget to subscribe to this channel wherever you are coming from. The very first thing that's gonna happen is podcast monetization is going to improve. Now over the years, Apple has been the incumbent, but they're losing market share to Spotify specifically. Google's coming into play. A lot of these people are coming in. Pandora is even coming into play as well. We're just on all these different platforms. So instead of just saying, oh, let's sell ads to other people and there's a middleman in there. You look at China, the podcast market in China is $3 billion. Now in the United States that year during comparison, it was $300 million. Now it's grown to $468 million. Now it's projected to grow to about $610 million or so. So it's getting bigger and bigger and the attention is super valuable because you get to hold people's attention when that's the only thing they're focused on. They're working out, they might be cooking, they might be cleaning, but that attention is very valuable. The way it's been monetized in the United States is just ads, but in China, People are donating, people are paying for a subscription, they're selling stuff on their site. But there's a lot of different ways to monetize versus just advertising, because advertising can be disruptive. Most of the time they're just too annoying to skip from a podcast advertising perspective. So number 2 is more competitors. Spotify, they just spent $200 million acquiring Gimlet to help them with creatives around podcasting. And then I think undisclosed amount, but I'm assuming $100 million or so on Anchor, which helps people produce podcasts quickly. They want podcasting to be 20% of their revenue by a certain point. And that's huge because they make a lot more money off podcasts versus doing all these types of record deals with people. Podcasting is big for them, but at the same time we're on Spotify on our podcast, but we're also on Pandora now too. So Pandora is coming into the game. There's also Shimalaya and there's also Himalaya. These are Chinese companies, but they're also getting into the game too. And you know, they think they have a better idea of how they can help creators monetize, um, from a, from a podcasting perspective. The number 3 is the analytics because Apple has kind of been the number one in this space and they haven't been paying too much attention, that allows competitors to catch up in terms of better monetization, better analytics. Um, people's gonna, people are going to come in to eat your lunch if you don't continue to innovate. And Apple is unfortunately a little behind here, but I will say that I did get to meet the head of podcasts at Apple at a conference and you know, he's aware of what's going on and they are going to roll up their sleeves and they're going to play the game more aggressively. They are aware of their number one position in the, in, uh, in the market. So they will play more aggressively hopefully, and it's going to be a better experience. What I want to talk about from an analytics standpoint is right now, sure, you know, with Apple Connect you can see, um, you know, the retention levels, you can see kind of the, the, the downloads. Um, but it's a lot less than what you might see from Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you so much data around the countries, the pages that they're visiting, the conversion data as well, where they came from in the beginning. There's all this different data right now. Right now there's a company called Chartable that you can check out. I use it right now. It gives you a lot of information around how your podcast is trending over time, the quarterly kind of comparison. And then they also have links that will actually help you track attribution, where people are coming in from to listen to your podcast. So analytics are going to get better. Monetization is going to get better too. Competition is going to push for innovation and that's going to be really good for podcast creators like myself. Um, if you don't have a podcast, if you think you don't have anything unique to say and you want to do one, I recommend trying it out. You can check out Anchor, which is now owned by Spotify. Check it out. Let me know what you think. So guys, drop in the comments below. What you plan to do with podcasts, what you think, where you think podcasts, podcasting is going, or maybe you're planning to start a podcast. Let us know in the comments below. Let us know what you think. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever channel, whatever platform you are coming from, and don't forget to check out the next clip and we'll see you tomorrow.
