The Myth of Peak Podcasting
The Growth of Podcasting
Last month Edison Research & Triton Digital released their 2020 Infinite Dial research. Two key findings from the report are:
Online audio listenership continues to grow, up to an estimated 192 million people in the US listening to online audio in the past month.
Both the number of people familiar with podcasting and listening to podcasts continues its rapid ascent.
Given that the demand for podcasts continues to grow, the next question would be what does the podcast supply look like? The industry passed a huge milestone recently, announcing that they have over 1 million podcasts in their catalog:
While a large number of those are likely not active, that’s still a significant amount of media. Some are calling this “peak podcasting”, with the medium being oversaturated. The argument is that there’s too much content for someone to navigate and discover. Correspondingly if you’re thinking of starting a podcast, some people will tell you not to because your idea has likely already been done. After all, how many podcasts can a single person listen to?
Media Saturation
Before we answer that question, let’s pause for a moment and take a look at some other media in the landscape:
Blogs: There are over half a billion blogs worldwide. Despite that, very few people would tell a business today they shouldn’t have a blog.
TV: When the modern ABC television network was founded in 1948, joining CBS & NBC, it added several hours of programming to the airwaves. You could argue that back then, there was already too much TV content for one person to consume. Yet, today there are over 15,000 TV channels in the world including local broadcasts. That doesn’t include the growing list of streaming services that offer serial & episodic content, with more being added every day.
Movies: Conservatively there have been over 500,000 movies made across Hollywood. If you add in foreign releases, that number balloons even further. Yet, as of publishing, IMDB expects there to be almost 4,100 movies released in 2019 alone.
Youtube: Over 500 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute. There are also over 23 million channels that you can subscribe to on the service.
TikTok: TikTok has shot up in popularity recently, with users flooding the service with dance moves, challenges and cooking advice. The service has over 800 million users worldwide, with the average user spending 52 minutes per day on the app.
Peak TV, Peak Movies, Peak Podcasting, Oh My!
Two things should be clear from the trends above:
Between TV, movies, and YouTube channels there is already too much content for a single person to watch, read, and enjoy. That’s before you add in other forms of entertainment like books, video games, and podcasting.
Despite the perceived saturation from a single persons POV, more and more content is added every day. There’s still plenty of room for new, innovative, and engaging content to find an audience.