Podcasts, not the next big thing. It’s here now.

Media giants are placing their bets on audio, specifically podcasts. Giants like Facebook recently announced a new podcast listening feature and Amazon acquired Wondery, a podcast publisher. The message is clear that podcasts are an effective audio storytelling medium. With thousands of podcasts on topics from gardening to investing, brands are taking notice of the niche categories and target consumers that podcasts deliver. In fact, PwC’s U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue Study predicted $2B in podcast ad revenue in the U.S. by 2023!

PwC’s revenue predictions are driven by a growing podcast audience which begs the question: why are podcasts so popular for consumers? Could it be that our “on-demand” lifestyle allows us to be more selective with the content we consume? And if so, podcasts are the holy grail. Unbound by production costs or on-screen viewing requirements, podcasts enable consumers to discover and immerse themselves in content they care about, anytime, anywhere. And from a communicators’ point of view, therein lies the appeal. The ultimate vehicle to deliver your clients message to a targeted audience searching for more information. Hail to the podcast!

Potential of Podcast Measurement

While popular, podcasting remains the wild west of media types. An unstructured, fragmented offer; a maze of possible apps to record them, listen to them, download, put in a sequence, and so on. Anyone can podcast and anyone can listen to a podcast. This, as it turns out, leads to a mind boggling volume of content being distributed, and growing by the day.

This also makes podcasting much more similar to digital media than to the world of radio and television and offers an opportunity to deliver deeper and more accurate audience measurements. Podcasters know exactly how many plays, downloads and web traffic their podcasts receive. This data can lead to more sophisticated metrics that can more accurately determine campaign performance for podcast advertisers and sponsors, not to mention communicators garnering earned media attention.

A Maturing Media Type

Still a young phenomenon, measuring it is also mostly undefined when compared to traditional digital media. Basic metrics are unclear apart from the obvious such as number of subscribers and unique downloads per episode. Should podcasts use the kind of metrics that are standard for online video? As we considered, there are similarities but also differences. While everything which is new usually is managed through existing tools, something more adept always takes the lead.

Borrowing metrics and processes from digital media measurement can be a first step in that direction. An obvious example is the length of listenership. Is it meaningful if a consumer only listens to 3 minutes of a 20 minute podcast episode? What if they skip the ads altogether? As we all know, this was an issue for online video until they implemented a “Skip Ad” button to increase the user experience and allow advertisers to only pay for ads that have been watched. Is the same on the horizon for podcasts?

What’s Possible Now and Where We Go From Here?

While there’s much work to do to open more sophisticated measurement opportunities, there have been great strides from companies invested in the media intelligence space to discover podcast content and aggregate listenership data. In order to continue growing we must recognize the urgent cooperation needed from hosts, platforms, podcasts, brands and agencies alike to reach these goals:

1. Coverage: the capability of having as many podcasts as possible on a single analysis platform will allow those comparison (absolute, by genre, by audience, etc.) that are a prerequisite for the generation of meaningful parameters
2. Comprehension: we need to be able to sort through podcast content, combining audio with speech to text technology and language analytics, to go from a purely quantitative perspective to meaningful qualitative one
3. Consistency: the definition of success enabled by relevant and specific metrics needs to be expressed by the whole industry. Publishers, hosts, platforms, agencies, clients must all participate in the effort to drive the industry to well-balanced and effective solutions.

Written by Alessandro Cederle and Susan Aitkin, TVEyes

About TVEyes: TVEyes Inc., headquartered in Fairfield, Conn., provides a subscription-based service for near real-time search of television and radio broadcasts, and podcasts, as well as infrastructure for search engines, business intelligence and media intelligence platforms. Its Media Monitoring Suite™ is in use by corporations, professional sports teams, political campaigns, elected officials and the military to provide up-to-the-second intelligence on broadcast in multiple languages for U.S. and international markets. More information on TVEyes can be found at tveyes.com.