Podcasting: The medium has a message - show us the money - 2nd September 2015

Profiles

Business Movies Hollywood Sports Television Entertainment Podcasts Streaming

The success of the Serial podcast, created by Sarah Koenig (centre) and her crew, is regarded as the trigger for a rise in interest in podcasting.

By Josh Jennings

Podcasting is rising rapidly in the frantic world of digital communication and entertainment, but now the industry must discover how to make money doing it.

Joel Zammit, founder of Melbourne-based comedy podcasting collective Sans Pants Radio, is manning the mixing desk at La Trobe University's student radio headquarters. The three podcasters on the other side of the control-room glass have their headphones on, microphones at whispering distance, and boots up on the central table.

Sans Pants is essentially a student collective but it's an effective one. Plumbing the Death Star, one of its podcasts, has charted in the top 10 on the iTunes Australian podcasting charts.

One predicament I find we're in when it comes to podcasting is that you can have success but it means nothing in terms of trying to make a living out of this. Joel Zammit

Zammit recounts the time one of his fellow podcasters phoned him at the gym and asked if he had noticed anything different about the iTunes United States podcasting charts that day. What he hadn't noticed was that Plumbing the Death Star had reached No. 61 on the US iTunes podcasting charts.

"He messaged me a screenshot of the iTunes chart," says Zammit.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

The true-crime podcast Serial, which was a branch off the popular US program This American Life, broke the mould for podcast popularity, reaching 5 million downloads and streams in record time from Apple's iTunes store last November, and beyond iTunes, hitting 40 million downloads by December. That started people talking about a "podcasting renaissance", but mostly the buzz has been around shows from US providers.

As an Australian podcaster, Zammit says success is still a very relative notion. "One predicament I find we're in when it comes to podcasting is that you can have success but it means nothing in terms of trying to make a living out of this."

Zammit has tested the waters. He recently contacted US podcast advertising network Midroll to ask about ad sponsorships. Hit shows such as Marc Maron's WTF can bring in between $250,000 to $400,000 a year for weekly shows attracting more than 100,000 downloads through Midroll, which probably explains why Maron releases bi-weekly shows rain, hail and shine, and reportedly attracts an average of 450,000 downloads per episode (according to his business partner Brendan McDonald).

"We contacted Midroll and it was a nice rejection letter," Zammit says.

Comedian Karl Chandler hosts one of Australia's most popular comedy podcasts, The Little Dum Dum Club, with fellow comedian Tommy Dassalo. In the early days of the podcast, they were the only international entrant in a competition to become part of the US-based Earwolf network. They reached the final two.

"From what we heard, it's monetarily better for them to have all their podcasts coming from America," Chandler says. "They can't really benefit from a small network like Australia."

In Australia, where US titles make up the majority of the podcasts in the upper-echelons of the local iTunes charts, podcasting hasn't reached its potential audience, says Alice Manners, chief executive of the Australian branch of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the peak trade association for online advertising in Australia.

A significant roadblock inhibiting Australian podcasters attracting advertiser revenue, Manners says, is the dearth of quality audio measurement.

Later this year, IAB is launching its Digital Audio Council, which intends to look at the rapidly changing needs of the digital advertising industry. "Hopefully as we come along and raise the awareness of the benefits and opportunity there, we'll start to see some Australian versions of great stuff like Serial," she says.

The ABC now produces First Run, a series of digital-first podcasts created for on-demand listening. Angela Stengel, ABC's digital radio product manager, says these podcasts – Confession Booth, Rum, Rebels and Ratbags and Science Vs - are being produced as the ABC examines how podcasts relate to traditional radio program formats, and what a podcast should be.

"With a podcast, we don't want to have things like time calls in it," Stengel says. "We don't want to have things which are really useful in live radio but don't serve any purpose in on-demand."

Southern Cross Austereo's (SCA) big push into podcasting began about a decade ago. Guy Dobson, the company's executive director of metro operations, says the goal was to provide podcasts that delivered the "great content" that happens on FM. It was FM radio shows reheated, essentially. "Nothing has really changed," Dobson says.

He says SCA has developed podcasts and social media content for "certain clients" but the company is still considering its options as to how to approach podcasting as a business.

As the intensifying ubiquity of smartphones, smooth high-speed wireless data, apps and in-car entertainment connectivity make the act of listening to podcasts increasingly simple, Stengel says it has implications for the type of audio content the ABC could produce. "Definitely the changes in devices and advance of technologies is what's making us shift our focus to ... a high-quality podcasting experience," she says.

Although podcasting is reaching relatively few listeners, a 2014 Edison Research report for the US said one in five weekly podcast users listened to six or more programs a week.

Even more important for podcasting as a business, award-winning US journalist Phoebe Judge, a host on WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and co-founder and host of crime podcast Criminal, says her listeners are engaging with her stories in a deeper way than they might with traditional radio.

"You necessarily most often are listening to podcasts in your ears – on headphones – so it's a much more intimate experience," she says. "So the types of stories that we tell are stories we hope you don't stop and start; that you really give your full attention to. That's why I think we feel that we can sometimes present complex stories."

This August, US podcast conference Podcast Movement drew more than 1000 podcasters from around the globe to examine how to create, produce and edit, monetise and market their products.

One of the key revelations to come from the conference was that because of how podcasting is structured, anyone with a good story to tell and some understanding of the business has a chance to be the next blockbuster such as Serial or WTF.

"It is a level playing field in who can put a podcast out," says Judge, who spends between 25 and 70 hours on each episode of Criminal. "That's one of the things I love about podcasting. Anyone can do it and anyone can do it about anything that they're interested in."

Love science? Listen to our new podcast Science is Golden.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, RSS or Pocket Casts.