Last year Joe Rogan signed an exclusive $100 million podcast deal with Spotify. Why not, his show, the Joe Rogan Experience, generates 190 million (!) downloads a month and $30 million in revenue per year. Podcasts have come a long way. They've been around for decades but have experienced explosive growth within the last six years or so. Today, according to Brandastic 55% of Americans listened to a podcast once a week in 2020; 24% listened to multiple podcasts weekly. Here's a chart of the growth of the medium (click to enlarge):
I started listening to podcasts in 2015 while driving. I became anamored with the stories in This American Life and other NPR podcasts, which were both informative and entertaining. Science says auditory retention is 2x as strong as reading and 4x as group lectures. And the form is very intimate, allowing you to build the images of stories in your mind; again, dramatized audio yields stronger mental imagery. Another critical reason podcasts are so popular: they allow for multitasking. People listen to podcasts while doing chores at home, driving, walking, working out and even at work. In fact, work is where the heaviest engagement (i.e., listening to multiple podcasts per week) seems to be! It's also an easy way to keep up with latest news and events. And there's a niche for just about everyone with 700,000 active podcasts and more than 29 million available episodes.
Podcasting is now a big business as evident by the Rogan-Spotify deal. Ad revenues for podcasts has grown by 1000% from 2015-2021; true, that's off of a very small base and the absolute numbers are just over $1 billion (compared to over $50 billion for TV). But the podcast market is expected to grow at a ~30% CAGR through 2027, making it, by far, the fastest growing media segment.
Spotify is the biggest platform for podcasts controlling 25% of the podcast market, followed by Apple (20%) and Google (16%). The 5 biggest podcasts generated over 60 million in revenue. They include:
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