Welcome to 2024…now what the hell do we do?
2023 definitely qualified as “interesting times” for the audio industry. So, what’s next?
Welcome to Dispatch #56 of The Audio Insurgent.
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break, whatever and however you celebrate. I spent a good share of the holiday break ill, which happens to me during almost every end of year break. One of my colleagues said yesterday, “I’ve been there too. It’s like once your body has permission to relax, it completely breaks down, as though you've been holding all that in and finally have permission to let yourself be sick.” The only disagreement I have with that idea is I never gave my body permission to do anything over the holidays except eat cheese, take naps, and sip Edradour Cream Liqueur (highly recommended but a bit hard to find, but watch out and go slow, this stuff is very potent). Being sick was never part of that conversation.
In my last dispatch, I mentioned that I had planned to put out one last 2023 dispatch about how to avoid creating boring stuff, which, apparently, a lot of people have no problem doing. But, between feeling sick and finding the topic of boredom, well, kinda boring, I’ve shelved that and here we are. Most likely the next time you hear from me, I’ll be making my pitch for reader subscriptions. If you want to get an early start and pledge your support now, you can do so by hitting the button below to pledge your support (you won’t be charged until I turn on subscriptions later this month).
So, speaking of happy new year…
[TODAY’S THING: WELCOME TO PODCASTING 2024] There have been lots of takes looking back at podcasting’s rollercoaster of a year in 2023. Most likely, if you read this newsletter, you don’t even need a recap.
Looking back to the first dispatch I shared in 2023, I wrote about my belief that the reckoning in podcasting was real, not a blip, and permanent…but that it would be okay. And while it is true that, despite all the drama and turmoil of the past year, podcasting is still a very healthy and growing industry, it probably doesn’t feel so okay for the several thousand people who lost jobs in podcasting during 2023.
And I really need to acknowledge that when I talk about the health of the industry and many of its companies, the shadow of those who lost jobs hangs over all of it. So please keep in mind that when I say that, by and large, podcasting isn’t in bad shape, it’s said with the acknowledgment that a lot of people have been displaced and they, on the individual level, would come to a very different conclusion.
Here is the quiet part that few are willing to say: almost all the changes in podcasting in 2023 needed to happen. Shows got canceled, jobs were eliminated, and companies folded–but almost across the board, those changes were necessary. If anything, the economic headwinds of 2023 (being slowdown in advertising and investment capital) forced companies to make decisions and correct problems they probably should have addressed previously.
And to me the biggest indicator of the truth of that statement is that all these changes happened, yet podcasting hasn’t seen any broad roadbumps or weakening: despite all the change, listening is still growing, both in the number of people listening to podcasts and the amount of their time/attention is devoted to listening to them. For all the drama around advertising, rates aren’t bad, pursestrings still remain mostly open, and ROI on podcast advertising is still impressively high. While the dumb money is gone, there is still some smart investment happening.
So is it wrong to say that all podcastings headaches and heartaches of the past year really haven't deeply affected the industry? Despite all that’s happened, podcasting isn’t dead–in fact it is probably healthier now than before the hammer started to come down in late 2022. Some not great press, sure. A lot of displaced people, yes. But podcasting has taken a lot of hits this year, and it remains almost unshakably strong. That shows that a lot of what happened felt like a big deal, but really didn’t change the course of podcasting.
While painful to experience or witness, those changes needed to happen.
Please keep in mind that it doesn’t mean the canceled shows were somehow bad or lacked value. It has nothing to do with quality. But almost universally, a canceled show either had a poorly devised and/or executed business plan, a poorly devised and/or executed audience development plan, was judged against unrealistic expectations, or, even worse, unclear, conflicting, or non-existent expectations. Or perhaps the show shouldn’t have been started up in the first place, because those running the company lacked the patience or ability to guide it.
The salad days of podcasting provided a lot of opportunity, but it also allowed networks to hide, avoid, or ignore a lot of systemic problems with their portfolios. It wasn’t that these problems couldn’t be fixed, it was just that no one had or gave the time and attention to fix them. The shows weren’t broken, the ecosystems around those shows were broken and the networks had run out the clock on time and resources to fix them.
In many cases, it wasn’t the show's fault, it was the company that didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t support it and set it up for success. Or, in some cases, realize that it wasn’t working and end it.
In other words, is it Heavyweight’s fault that it was canceled? Did it suck? Did it stop working? Was it a bad show? Hell, no. It was a great show with a strong audience. The people in charge of guiding the show and building the audience and business around it? They should own its fate. When you make something windowed or exclusive, for example, why is the show’s staff at jeopardy because you made that move knowing that it would deplete 75% of the show’s audience? Yet the show staff are the first ones to go, often because the company admitted its problems far too late. Those who put the show in that position? Often they still stay.
Equally and similarly, it doesn’t mean that those who were laid off were not great at their jobs. Something that really stuck with me: this year I had a conversation with a podcast host who had been laid off after her company announced her show was ending. I asked her, “When you were named host, what training did you get? Did you get any coaching on how to be a host? Any feedback, mentorship, or guidance?”
The answer: no. She was a host of a flagship show and no one ever sat her down to explain what that role meant, mentored her, or gave her any feedback on the show. She struggled. The show struggled. Nobody at the company helped. The show got canceled. The entire staff was laid off. No network executive was ever held accountable for the failure. All the execs kept their jobs.
I struggle to find exceptions to this: when a podcast is canceled and all its staff laid off, it’s the network that screwed things up, often through negligence.
As someone who thinks about the podcast industry, I’m struck that the story of 2023 isn’t one story. The year wasn’t the same for everyone, all shows, and all companies. In fact, it's very different across the industry.
The Haves
The companies making the biggest plays, operating the biggest staffs, biggest shows, and making the boldest moves were the ones who really got bounced around this year and created a lot of collateral damage. That shouldn’t surprise. Look at most coverage of the podcast industry and these are the companies that were exhaustively covered as they pulled back in 2023.
Yet their experiences don’t represent everyone’s. And what they have to do to recover this year is also different. In speaking with people at these companies, many are STILL fixated on advertising. As advertising dollars start to roll back in, they feel better about the prospects for the year. The sad thing is that this indicates that these people learned nothing from 2023. They are destined to be on the same hamster wheel of boom and bust tied to the cycles of the ad marketplace. Which means these companies are going to slowly build up another portfolio of programs, be too overwhelmed or stretched thin to support them, and watch the whole thing crash back down, again.
Those who do well in 2024 and through the next cycle will be those who take stock of what changed in 2023, what opportunities 2023 created, and how to avoid the systematic and strategic pitfalls that screwed them up last year.
The Pretty-Much Haves
These are the shows that are wrongly considered “middle class” in podcasting–shows you’ve probably heard of, but not our industry’s household names. They aren’t commanding mega-deals from the big companies, but they have a pretty solid base: strong audience numbers, solid advertising base, and have activated on other revenue lines such as subscriptions, live events, or merch. A great way to categorize these shows is that these are the shows where several people are earning a living, but no one is getting rich.
The past few years have been good to these shows and full of easy opportunities. But this year, they had to work harder just to stay afloat. Ad sales packages sold for less. Fewer new clients came in. Audience growth was harder to come by. Everything just felt like a lot of motion to stand still. It was a bit scary.
The Pretty-Much haves will need to accept that the effort they put into their show’s business in 2023 is now status quo. Things aren’t going back to being easy. If you want more revenue, you will work harder to get it than you did for the established revenue you see now. If you want more audience, you will have to take audience building more seriously than you’ve ever needed to (because in the past audience just magically came to you). If you want your show to be more appealing to more people more often, you need to make the investment of time and resources to level it up, which felt unnecessary before.
The Strugglers
This is the group of shows that are just on the verge of having enough audience and reach to be taken seriously for advertising and other opportunities. They may be making some money, but not enough to break even. They may have made some headway with audience building, but they can feel there are more people out there who would love their show. Unfortunately for The Strugglers, the bar is still there, but it has been raised. While you probably needed to reach 50,000 listens an episode to unlock big ad deals, that number is probably now at 100k.
The Don’t Haves
This group are those literal millions who start podcasts and just want to find a place in the industry. Think of 95%+ of the attendees at podcasting conferences. Starting from nothing, on their own. In many aspects of life, the ones at the bottom of the ladder feel the impact the worst, and I think that’s true here too. While these folks were far away from the 8-figure podcast deals, all the headline activity has caused a lot of changes downstream. The rise and tumble of podcasting over the past few years, done to professionalize and commercialize the industry’s potential, have now made it depressingly hard for anyone to be successful. And you can define success in a number of ways (audience, financial, impact, derivative rights potential, and more), and podcasting in 2024 has never been harder to succeed on any of these markers.
So, that’s all really upsetting, right? It was hard to write, I can imagine it was hard to read too.
But do not lose hope. If things are hard, or maybe just harder, that doesn’t mean they are impossible.
The good news is we find ourselves at a rare moment: while everyone in podcasting has different problems, the solutions are very similar across the board.
You need to be better. Better at executing your idea.
More thoughtful in planning for your future.
And you need to get WAY better at telling stories, specifically, your own.
And if you are a podcast network, or aspire to be in the podcast business, you can’t spend your way to success. It takes resources, sure, but you also need to invest in what you make in order to build it into something valuable. You can’t spend your way through show support, either.
A few dispatches ago, I talked about how shocking it was to see displaced podcast producer resumes and how uniformly bad they were at using a resume to tell about themselves in a meaningful way. Jobs had been so easy to come by in podcasting that no one had any reason to come up with resumes that really sell them, their talent, and their skill. And it shows.
Now extrapolate that to EVERYTHING in podcasting. Show descriptions. Sales decks. Business plans. Asking simple questions like “If you have 10,000 listeners an episode, where will you find your next 10,000 listeners?” And it all scales up and down: if you have 300 or 3 million listeners, where do the next equal size batch come from? Very few are doing well at telling their story, making the case for why they matter or why their audience/community matters, why potential listeners should try them out, why businesses should sponsor or partner with them, or taking the time to understand the dynamics of actions and outcomes. When podcasting was red hot, no one asked these questions–no one needed to. Podcasting has blissfully avoided thinking in grounded, rational planning and thinking rooted in the laws of physics. But now you do. Will it take a lot of money and time to plan or change? Not necessarily.
In the coming months, we’ll use these dispatches to look into a lot of these questions: how to be better, how to plan, and how to tell your own story better.
If there was an Audio Insurgent strategic plan for 2024, you just read it.
[COULD WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE, PLEASE?]
While I was sick, my wife (who was also sick) and I plowed through all three seasons of Slow Horses. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. Well-written and well-acted. It is a pretty typical spy thriller, but a well-executed spy thriller. Also, weirdly, in the show, their office is located on the same block as Audible’s UK headquarters, so I know the neighborhood very well. As they are walking down streets, eating in restaurants, standing in barbershop, crossing on the pedestrian bridge, etc—I recognized so many places I’d spent time. It was a pleasant trip down memory lane and a fun way to wait-out a mild fever.
We just started on Drops of God, and all indicators point to that being better-than-average TV too.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric