Are podcasts the right medium to keep up with how people consume content?

It's been a while since we've talked about podcasting. Podcasting is obviously a massive part of Barstool's business. There's currently 1.95 million podcasts out there and. over 47 million episodes as of March this year. This is up from 550,000 podcasts nearly a year ago.

We talk about media fragmentation, but it's interesting to see the podcast fragmentation. Obviously one of the biggest challenges affecting podcasting that will continue to affect podcasts in the future is just saturation. There also is a challenge of a long tail which is why companies like Apple are trying to create micro-subscription products or companies like Spotify are trying to harness the long tail of podcasting. One other thing to look at with podcasts is how many active podcasts there are. The number now is way down compared to December of 2020. The number of active podcasts on Apple alone has decreased almost 20% from December of 2010 to March of 2021.What's interesting to see is that something is affecting podcasting, but it's a bunch of factors at play. One is that the market is very saturated with podcasts. In the pandemic, people commuted less. They were on more Zoom calls. They were spending more time on their phone, but less so in less places where a podcast would be the most organic or the obvious media choice.

One of the most interesting things that's happening in podcasting is to understand where podcasts go now. Podcasts were such the rage in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Now we're kind of seeing a point where there are almost too many podcasts and consumers are spending less time commuting. They're spending no time on the subway. People aren't spending the whole nature of morning drive. So, one of the interesting things that's happening with podcasting is essentially that the consumer has changed and the medium now isn't the right size nor the right format for what it's intended consumer is doing. So what you're going to see more people moving to social, live streaming, and shorter, more digestible bits of content like on TikTok. Three years ago, if you had something to say the best way to do it was to either write a blog or to create a podcast, but now what we're seeing is that if you've got something to say, people will listen if they see it on TikTok.

What we're seeing is that podcasts are an extremely important and an extreme unique medium. I don't think podcasting is going away. But I do think it's interesting that when I talk to old school people, they're just now trying to figure out their podcast strategy. And we're over here trying to figure out what life after our podcast strategy looks like. And I think this is in part because you're seeing such democratization in so many people can create podcasts. You're also seeing the challenge of when we started, how Big Cat and PFT started Pardon My Take. It wasn't hard to break through. There weren't that many podcasts on sports. Now you do a Google search for a sports podcast and you will find hundreds, if not thousands of sports podcasts.

So, what we have to figure out and what we're focused on is. Yeah, it's great to have something that works in audio, but is a long form audio show when you're target 20-something-year-old audience is no longer commuting the right place and time to put your creative effort? Is that the right format for your opinion? And those are the things that we're starting to think about. 

We get into the nitty-gritty of podcasting on today's new Token CEO. More of my thoughts on the past, present, and future of podcasting there, listen here: