From Wired’s Podcast Listeners Really Are the Holy Grail Advertisers Hoped They’d Be:
For starters, it means you don’t need to worry that your feed will become populated with shows nearly identical in structure and length as podcasters rush to optimize around the new data—the doomsday podcast equivalent of, say, pivoting to video.
This article has been blogged near to death at this point by podcasters and advertisers alike. However, I think many people have missed this key section.
One of the big fears of increased interest in the podcasting medium has been that showstopper will become same-y as advertisers gain more influence. The current analytics seem to show that this will not be the case.
Anyone who ventures past the NPR and Gimlet Media realm of podcasting should hopefully know that by now. Shows like Maximum Fun’s My Brother, My Brother and Me have done a fantastic job of integrating ads into the content for years. Nate Dimeo, of Radiotopia’s The Memory Palace, recently supplemented his advertising supported content with a residency at The Met.
Podcasters across the industry are playing with form, show structure and monetization models in a way unlike the infamous “pivot to video” of four or five years ago. It gives me a lot of hope for podcasts as a medium and generally makes me skeptical of pieces like the above from Wired.