How can podcasting be the biggest driver of growth in my business? And I really think it’s one of those things that can be. It’s something I’ve seen work really well for myself and many other podcasters I engage with and talk with regularly.
But before we get into that, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an understanding on the state of play in podcasting in general. And there’s been some really big moves in the last couple of years, which I think are worth paying attention to, and some things you should be paying attention to.
So number one is that Spotify, in recent years, have spent $500 million acquiring podcast startup companies to bring them to their platform. That’s 500 million, so an astronomical amount. And that’s not an amount you drop by chance. It’s a pretty serious amount of money to do it. But it’s not just Spotify.
Apple has just started their reign of improving their podcast app. For those of you that use Apple devices, you’ll also start to see that there is Apple exclusive content now. Apple has, although once I suppose discovering this industry, are now back in line realizing how big it could be. So you’ve got two huge plays.
But then the next one that has just come out as well and this is the one that really needs to be paid attention to is that Google are now indexing podcasts and also to be taken really seriously if you’re an Android user. So we’ve got these three huge titans really starting to take podcasting much more seriously. And with good reason, because the industry in itself is exploding, you only have to have a look by the show of hands of how many people are actually engaging with podcasts these days.
And I’ve been doing a bit of research on this. And it’s been forecasted that podcasting itself is the next billion-dollar media revenue stream. And I thought this was quite an interesting chart to include. But this just kind of shows year on year how much money is being poured into advertising on podcasts in the United States. And I thought it’s quite astronomical to see the growth of that and how it’s continuing.
What I really want to emphasize here is that I feel we are very much in a window of opportunity where the time is now for podcasting. It really, really is. It almost feels like five years ago of blogging was where you could start a blog and find some really good success. Podcasting is in that stage. And although it may seem that everyone has a podcast, and there’s actually 770,000 podcasts registered on Apple, the reality is that the demand for podcasting is far exceeding the supply in the current market, which is why it’s such a great opportunity.
Now, if you have a podcast, this is one of those times where I would encourage you to take it a lot more seriously. This is the time when you can actually scale that show far beyond where you probably are at the moment.
And if you don’t have a podcast, this is the time to really consider if it suits your business and what you want to achieve. And you still can actually create an astronomical show and we’ve seen some shows that have started at Valher Media and within 12 months, racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads because of the demand in these areas.
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