What If Podcasting Is Just Starting?
It feels like everybody has a podcast already.
But what if the game has barely even begun?
This chart from Edison Research (and Podnews) details why this may be the case:
For context, 63% of U.S. adults listen to the radio daily (source: NPR). 83% listen to the radio weekly:
It’s hard to imagine, a world in which podcasts are bigger than they already are. Because if you live on the Internet... it already seems like there are so many.
But John Shahidi (President for NELK) recently told Casey Adams that we’re just getting started (source):
I think podcasts are going to be like consumer goods products. I think everyone’s going to have one. I think it’s its own platform. … Eventually I feel like everyone will have their own… Some people are going to be late to the game, like a lot of actresses and actors were to social media … And then everyone is going to have their own podcast network. LeBron James is doing that. Kevin Durant has his own network as well.
This was a big reframe for me. If you imagine podcasts as social media accounts, you start to think of them completely differently.
According to ListenNotes, there are almost 3 million podcasts out there.
To put this in context, there are 51 million YouTube channels.
Now, it’s not quite the same thing. It’s easier to start a YouTube channel than it is to start a podcast. But maybe that will change some time over the next decade. I’d venture to guess it will.
Imagine living in 1436 – when the printing press got invented. By 1500, it probably felt like everyone had written a book. There’s so many books out there! Who could possibly read all this? Little did they know how many more books would be created.
It’s probably a similar story for podcasts and videos. There are so many out there today. But that doesn’t mean the quality won’t rise. And there will be many more over the coming decade.
People have been communicating in the written word, audio, and video for a long time. But now anyone can do it. There’s more competition for eyeballs and earholes, but also means a more equitable chance for anyone to publish something and for it to get seen or heard by millions of people.
I don’t imagine it getting easier than right now to get seen or heard. Meaning if podcasting or video creating is something you could imagine yourself doing a decade from now, what’s stopping you from starting today?
From my vantage point, we’re just getting started.
By the way, if you’re interested in podcasting… check out my latest episode with Sriram and Aarthi.
They run a tremendous podcast called The Good Time Show where they’ve interviewed people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hawk, and Gary Vaynerchuk. In this conversation, we spoke getting into tech before it was cool, podcasting secrets, what it’s like to be an insider, and what it’s like to interview Elon Musk to 800,000 people.
Check out the full episode here (or listen here):