Hey, this is Tom Webster for Sounds Profitable on Thursday, March 13th, 2025. Podcasting 3.0. Well, the industry has come a long way, but the podcast consumption experience hasn't. And it's starting to show why we need a more one-button experience if we really want to grow the audience pool. But first, the power of branded podcasts is now available. It's the latest report in the Sounds Profitable Educational Series, or SPES, brought to you by JAR Audio.
And this looks at 43% of Americans 18 plus who would likely listen to a podcast about their favorite brand or product and actually focuses in on the 15% who say they would be very likely. You can catch the webinar recording that features me debuting the research alongside Liz Hames, who's the director of audience growth at Jar Audio and a case study from Amazon senior producer and host of podcast programming.
Andrea Marquez, and there'll be a link for that in the show notes. You know, I almost called today's podcast how podcast apps are failing us, but I had a good breakfast, the sun is shining, and I'm not going to start in the bad place. Still, I've been neck deep in a brand new research study that will be debuting at Podcast Movement or Evolutions by Podcast Movement, I should say, in Chicago. And I've got a few concerns.
First, I want to revisit something that we've already published last year in the podcast landscape 2024. And it was a ratio of awareness, trial and usage of podcasting. And it went something like this. 94% of Americans 18 plus are familiar with podcasting, and 74% say they have ever consumed one. When you go to who's used them monthly, it drops to 53, and then weekly, it drops from 37.
now i looked at the gap from ever listened to weekly user that's 74 to a drop down to 37 that's basically a 50 conversion ratio Now, when I first presented that data, I made the point that I didn't really love that look for podcasting. The ratio of awareness to trial to regular usage was lower than I've seen for many other media channels over the course of my career.
So a big part of our next study is a thorough benchmarking of this data with as many other media channels as we could possibly fit into the questionnaire. And I can tell you two things after having seen some of the top line data. One. We have a definitive answer as to whether or not this is a good ratio. And two, it isn't. Now, exactly how far down the pecking order podcasting is in terms of converting...
casual consumers to regular listeners or viewers. I'm going to save that for Chicago. But let's take this as a fact. Podcasting hasn't yet cemented its place as a daily driver for people. Something they reliably fit daily into their spare time, their work time, or their commute in the ways that some other media channels have. Now, part of this may be down to cadence. And that kind of makes sense, right?
Unless you're a habitual consumer of daily news or daily sports podcasts, most podcasts deliver at a weekly cadence, which inadvertently may have conditioned people to a weekly consumption cadence. If the thing you are looking for is not there every day, you don't look for it every day. However, I think some of this also has to be laid directly at the feet of the various dedicated apps that we have for podcast consumption.
Now, I've been talking in this podcast for over a year since we released Sound You Can See at the end of 2023 about how a big part of the rise of YouTube and podcasting is not endemic to video necessarily, but to the quality of the app itself. It does a lot of things. It does them really well. And it does things that dedicated podcast apps simply aren't providing. Now, there is, of course, the loose initiative that we call Podcasting 2.0.
which has the intention of making the podcast experience better, but the initiative's outcomes have been spotty. And I'll direct you to a couple of podcasts, and we'll have the links in the show notes here. One is with... Mark Asquith and Danny Brown and their podcast In and Around Podcasting. And another, it was from a recent episode of the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi. And they poked around at what the success of Podcasting 2.0 was.
And I think James had the right of it, who made the point that some things have worked, some things haven't, but there's no steady hand on the tiller that's really driving the initiative forward. Now, I agree with all of that, and I'll toss in this. Podcasting 2.0 hasn't been firmly seated in improving the listener experience. Now, the last time I made that comment, I got slapped with, but we are also listeners by some of the Podcasting 2.0 contributors, but no.
No, they're not. They're not normal listeners. Normal listeners aren't crying out for V4V or a duplicative images tag. Now here's the good news. We don't need to guess what people find valuable or sticky. They're telling us with their daily behavior. All we need to do is examine the platforms and channels that they use daily and ask ourselves, honestly, what do we find wanting about how podcasting is generally delivered to those audiences?
Now, in all cases, the content is great. We have great radio content. We have great content on Facebook. We have great content on YouTube. And yes, amazing podcast content. It's the applications that deliver that content, however, that interest me. Even the application that is a piece of hardware, like an AM FM radio, for instance. Now, I don't want, as in do not want, to brand this as podcasting 3.0. But here are 3.0 things that the best...
Daily drivers and content provide that so many dedicated podcast apps do not. Now, we may not need all of these to improve the listener and yeah, I mean listener experience, but we can't accept having none of them. or we risk podcasting becoming marginalized by the platforms that continue to deliver these basic user-focused benefits. And the good news, I believe, is that a lot of these things can be accomplished by AI. without having to overhaul RSS. 1. One button to joy.
This is a big one, I think, and one of the supreme advantages of apps like your good old five button radio. You push a button, you get the thing you want. You push the Facebook button on your phone, you get the thing you want. And if you push the TikTok button on your phone, you get the thing you want. Even Netflix struggles with this one. You don't always get what you want when you click that button.
Sometimes you scroll and click for hours, hoping for that thing you want, but find it elusive. Podcast apps don't always give you one-button joy. You click the one button, and you get a bunch more buttons. and the opportunity to find the content that you want. Even if you have a one-button listening cue, what order is that in? Not the order you want. It's likely in reverse chronological order of release.
which means that if you get in your car to commute to work and you push that one button, you might be getting your board game podcast instead of the news, traffic, and weather that would really suit in that moment. Because that episode on the 65th expansion for Settlers of Catan just dropped. I do think that AI can help here. If we want podcasting to be a daily driver for people.
The technology exists for an app to ascertain that we are in the car. It's 8.15 in the morning, and we probably need to know a few things in 20 minutes before we start our day. Radio does this reliably every day. Social media also reliably delivers a friction-free digital vacation at our desks or elsewhere whenever we want to take it.
Closely related to the one-button experience is the promise of consistent, reliable delight. This is another way of saying the discovery problem, I suppose. But it's closer to something rhetoricians would call the known new contract. Consistent, reliable delivery of novel experiences wrapped in the comfort and structure of expected experiences. Certainly, social media gives you this every day and with one button. You have curated your feed.
You know generally what you're going to get and from whom, but still, your feed surprises and delights you every single day without you having to program it. Again, radio does this, but let me give you an example of something even better. that I wish were still around. My good old Slacker G2 portable personal radio player. I used to love this thing. It combined the one-button experience of an MP3 player with the serendipity of a radio station.
Basically, you would seed a playlist with a few songs, and on-demand Slacker would build you a discrete playlist that was then downloaded to the device for offline on-demand consumption. This station... mimicked the programming of a commercial radio station with consistent delivery of new and novel songs anchored by the presence of your favorites. The only programming you needed to do
was occasionally press thumbs up or thumbs down on different songs. But otherwise, the software did the heavy lifting every time you sync the device to provide you with a reliable source of discovery. Yes, modern on-demand music services like Spotify have replaced the hardware with software. But there was something pure and simple about the Slacker G2. It provided structure and novelty and one button to joy.
without the user doing much, if any, work. Now you contrast that with the experience of discovery in a podcast app, and you'll see something very different. Can I listen to whatever I want whenever I want? Yeah, if I build it. When people open YouTube, Facebook, or hit a preset on their radio, they don't have to build anything. They get structured serendipity.
the reliable delivery of discovery. This again is something AI could help with. I could imagine, for instance, pushing my one button for joy and getting an audio digest of everything that's new in my podcast feed. along with a simple verbal input to play which one of those new episodes I'd like to hear in the moment. Truly, the realization of one of the greatest ideas of the 1997 classic Starship Troopers.
Would you like to know more? And number three, acknowledgement. We know from Sound You Can See and other studies that the comments section is a big driver for YouTube. Whether you actually leave a comment or not, you know that you could. You can also just like or react to something on LinkedIn or Blue Sky. And there it is. Your name in lights next to a big thumb.
What most daily drivers in media today do is allow people to feel seen. I first learned the Zulu greeting Saul Bona from my friend Chris Brogan years ago. It's a term that means, I see you. And as a greeting, it's intended to impart a sense of dignity and worth. More than just, hey, what's up? Sawubona signals to your fellow human that you're present in the moment, you really see them, and you acknowledge that presence.
It's a delightful phrase, and it's often answered with yebo saubona. Yes, I see you too. We need dedicated podcast apps that tell our audience every day saubona. We need them to feel seen, heard, and acknowledged now this by the way is something that the current podcasting 2.0 initiative is trying to address with a social interact tag in rss that would link to a root comment thread
And there are some early implementations of this that are promising. But this really needs to be front and center in podcasting apps if we want to encourage daily use and habit. Those three characteristics are evident in many of the platforms and channels. that we're addicted to, the ones that have quickly converted from trial to usage to daily habit. Incorporating these aspects of observed consumer behavior into how that we consume podcasts is, I believe,
an existential concern for podcasting, certainly for RSS-driven podcasting. And we've got to get them right. Thanks again for listening to this week's podcast, Podcasting 3.0. For Sounds Profitable, I'm Tom Webster, and I'll see you next week.