Let’s talk about podcasts, a traffic depression

As the audience of podcasts expands, more and more people are starting to "dig for gold" in the podcast scene. So, overall, how is the performance of the audio consumption market? What problems are there to be solved on the road to commercialization of podcasts? In this article, the author interprets the current podcast ecosystem, that is, the commercial monetization value hidden behind the podcast ecosystem, etc. Let's take a look.

Once upon a time, radio programs became a popular form of entertainment and leisure with advantages such as "telephone interaction". However, with the development of visual media, more and more viewers began to be attracted by television and the Internet, and radio programs therefore withdrew from the urban cultural stage. But now, podcasts, a form of content with a sense of age, have brought audio programs back into the public eye.

According to data from market research firm eMarketer, the number of Chinese podcast listeners exceeded 100 million in 2022, and will maintain an average annual growth rate of 15.8% between 2023 and 2024. Recently, the latest season of the well-known podcast program "Comedian Chat Club" sold more than 30,000 paid copies and earned more than 3 million yuan, which also made people see the monetization potential of podcasts.

Compared with the booming popularity of short videos, podcasts may still be just a form of content popular in niche circles. However, the collective influx of listeners, podcast channel owners and brands is transforming podcasts from a niche utopia into a new content trend, and continues to explore the commercial value behind them.

1. Audio consumption has never disappeared

After mobile Internet applications fragmented people's time, the competition for user attention among content platforms became more intense. However, while short video platforms continue to accumulate user traffic with data algorithms, there is still a considerable group of people who are obsessed with the value of audio content as the companionship value of life scene BGM. Therefore, daily life scenes such as driving, fitness, and commuting have become the main consumption scenes of audio content.

By observing the hot lists of Himalaya, Xiaoyuzhou and Lizhi, the Jingzhe Research Institute found that there are three main types of blogs with the highest number of views.

The first type is knowledge-based podcasts, which include knowledge sharing in vertical fields and in-depth thinking on the interpretation of social issues. A relatively famous channel is "Hu Zuo Hu You", whose program topics mainly involve literature, modern and contemporary history at home and abroad, etc. The main guests are experts and scholars who have deep roots in related fields, which has created the scarcity of podcast content. Many listeners said that listening to the program here is like tracing back to the Hundred Schools of Thought in the study.

Another representative channel, "Xian Ning Qi", is a podcast program of personal interviews hosted by media person Cao Ning. Whether it is a famous celebrity or an interesting amateur, they will share their professional status and lifestyle, and through dialogue, express the current young people's understanding and needs of life from a new perspective.

The second type is social podcasts. These podcasts usually focus on life-related topics, provide a sense of companionship for listeners, or resonate with listeners on social issues. For example, "Time-limited Superficiality" discusses some "details" in life when everyone is pursuing depth and meaning, sharing the wisdom of life in a down-to-earth way.

Compared with "Time-limited Superficiality", "Random Fluctuations" prefers to explore social values ​​and also pays attention to women's issues. "Random Fluctuations" has jointly launched three podcasts with NEIWAI to share contemporary women's thoughts on the workplace, family, friendship and self-growth.

The third type is IP-type podcasts, which are mainly podcast programs centered around well-known public figures. For example, "How Much Am I Worth" is a workplace podcast variety show hosted by debater Chen Ming.

Diverse content has created the current flourishing podcast market, and the user scale is also growing. In 2022, the global podcast search engine ListenNotes predicts that the number of podcast listeners in China will be about 86 million, and it is expected that by 2024, the number of users will grow to about 200 million. The expansion of the podcast user scale has also attracted the attention of major online audio platforms.

At present, in addition to Internet radio applications such as Himalaya, Qingting FM, and Lizhi, online music applications such as NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music have also begun to enter the podcast market. The entry of giants not only reflects that the growth of podcast content users has brought new traffic value, but also means that diversified audio content has the opportunity to tap into more commercial value through the business systems of Internet giants. This has undoubtedly found a "new world" for online media that has experienced the iteration from pictures and texts to short videos.

2. Commercialization Challenges That Remain

Although the current podcast has entered a rising period, commercialization is still the biggest problem for channel owners who run podcast programs besides content creation. Yang Qifan, the host of the interview podcast "Goodbye Boss", founded his first podcast program "35mm" in 2013. Due to no income for about 5 years, he chose to stop in 2017.

According to a report by Cultural Industry Review, the current revenue of domestic podcasts and brands for advertising cooperation is 0.6-0.7 yuan per thousand views, which is much lower than the 20-100 US dollars in the US market. In comparison with the advertising unit prices of content platforms such as WeChat public accounts and Bilibili, the average price of WeChat public account reading is 1.5 yuan per time, and the average price of Bilibili reading is 0.6-1 yuan per time. Based on the current situation that the top podcast has a broadcast volume of about 300,000 per episode, its advertising quotation is not even as high as the second WeChat public account.

From the perspective of media attributes, podcasts have obvious commercial flaws. Compared with pictures, texts, and short videos, podcasts lack visual elements and are difficult to quickly catch the user's "eyeballs". In the Internet social scene dominated by text and video, the dissemination efficiency of audio content is low, and the threshold for secondary dissemination is also high.

Usually, it only takes users 2-3 minutes to read a text or picture on a public account, but a podcast program can last dozens of minutes. Asking the users who are shared to spend an equivalent amount of time listening to an audio clip of unknown content largely challenges the target users' ability to control their time costs.

In addition to the natural disadvantages brought by the attributes, the incomplete industry ecology also puts podcasts at a disadvantage when facing the choice of brand placement. In the traditional radio era, the listening rate of radio programs was the same as the ratings of TV programs, and there were professional organizations responsible for statistics. However, nowadays, the listening data of domestic podcast programs is basically counted by the platforms themselves, and the standards and basis of the statistical data are not consistent. Therefore, it is difficult to directly use the listening volume of podcast programs to reflect the actual dissemination volume.

In addition, because podcasts have a much smaller user base than mainstream content platforms such as short videos and live broadcasts, many platforms are reluctant to disclose real user data. In this context, brands cannot obtain accurate user portraits and interaction data, resulting in a lack of objective basis for important links such as placement decisions and effect tracking. As a result, brands are less enthusiastic about placing podcast content than video content.

It is worth mentioning that in Europe and the United States, where the podcast culture started earlier, the business system centered on podcasts has gradually matured. In the United States, research institutions began tracking the size of the podcast market in 2016, and professional institutions such as Nielsen also tracked data on podcast placement cases.

With the growth of the domestic market and the entry of technology giants, it may only be a matter of time before the domestic podcast industry improves. An even more favorable background is the popularization of the content payment model, which brings the creators of podcast content a bright prospect of "money prospects".

Before podcasts became popular, the long-term education of the knowledge payment industry had already screened out a group of mature users who were willing to pay for content. In recent years, the continuous "price increase" of paid membership services on online video platforms has also continuously strengthened users' awareness of paying for content.

According to iMedia Research, the number of paid knowledge users will exceed 570 million in 2023 and is expected to reach 640 million in 2025. A survey conducted by PodFest China in August 2021 also showed that 87.8% of Chinese podcast listeners said they were not averse to the commercialization of podcasts, and 88.5% of listeners had paid for podcast content.

With the real demand for audio content and a mature user base with payment awareness, it seems that the only thing left for the commercialization of podcasts is to wait for the improvement of the industrial ecosystem and then start the business of exchanging content and traffic for cash.

3. Competition and Cooperation between Channel Owners and Brands

In the long run, podcasts are a new track and a new blue ocean that are particularly eye-catching. But before commercial realization, the long-term operation of podcasts will test the patience of channel owners.

Zhu Feng, the host of "Jinjinledao", once posted a dynamic: After recording a podcast, I feel like I will be "Daily Talk Park" tomorrow. I check the subscription and playback volume 20 times a day, try various new content formats, and occasionally put it on the homepage, but I am afraid that the content will not be able to keep up with the new listeners. After a few episodes, I found that there was no content to talk about, and the user growth has reached a bottleneck period. 80% of new podcast creators will give up at this stage.

In reality, many podcast channel owners have the same experience: when they first started podcasting, they did it for love, spent a lot of time and energy to produce content, but in the end they didn’t make any money. Later, they chose to stop because they were too busy with work or because the podcast program had no income.

Different from the embarrassing situation of individual channel owners due to profit issues, brand creators who do not rely on content to make money seem to be more comfortable in the podcast field. As early as 6 years ago, CHANEL launched a podcast program called "3.55", which is also one of the earliest podcast programs of luxury brands.

In the early days, 3.55 focused on telling the lesser-known stories of the brand, hosted by journalist Daphné Hézar, and invited many guests to let listeners understand the operation behind the brand. In 2021, CHANEL adjusted its podcast content strategy and launched a new cultural podcast program "ChanelConnects", which brought together big names from the fields of art, film, music, etc. to discuss how their respective industries are developing and moving forward in the world, making the podcast more diverse in subject matter.

In addition to luxury brands, Nike, a sports brand that is willing to promote the concept of life, also launched a brand podcast "Trained" focusing on health topics on overseas audio platforms in 2018. In September 2022, Nike launched a Chinese podcast called "Nai Ting", which not only tells listeners about sports and athletes' off-field life, but also explores their wonderful lives deeply tied to sports.

For mature brands, podcasts provide a storytelling platform as a brand communication tool. On the one hand, with content as the core, they help brands reach and attract new users, and on the other hand, they help brands establish a deep emotional connection with consumers. In addition, the niche, novel and unique temperament of podcasts themselves has also become an important way for new consumer brands to shape their brand image and gather private domain traffic. For example, coffee brands Santonban and Yongpu Coffee have launched brand podcasts "Planet Radio" and "Island Radio Station" respectively, of which the former has 14,000 subscriptions.

However, perhaps because new consumer brands are collectively facing a shortage of funds recently, or because the content cooperation has expired, Sandunban's "Planet Radio" has now been renamed "Hidden World", and the latest content update stopped on January 11. "Island Radio Station", which has launched 23 programs since January 2022, updates 2 programs per month on average, but the most recent update was on June 16, and there has been no update since July, which inevitably makes people speculate that its brand podcast may be discontinued.

From the user's perspective, the value of podcasts lies in the value of the content itself and the value of accompanying as background music, which is a unique environmental advantage given to audio content in the fragmented mobile Internet era. When people are tired of being fed all kinds of useless information by news and short video applications, they naturally want to regain the initiative of content consumption, and podcasts provide a content experience that has been deprived of other content platforms.

The podcast track, which is currently attracting much attention, is easily reminiscent of the public accounts and short videos that were once a hot topic. The difference is that the attention of contemporary young people is increasingly attracted by niche culture, and it is constantly differentiated into different niche cultural circles. This is a challenge for brand communication, but it is an opportunity for podcasts.

With the joint efforts of podcast channel owners, platforms and institutions, podcasts, as a niche utopia, are leading people to a new Internet content ecosystem linked by niche culture.

Author: Xiaoman

Original title: The next Dong Yuhui may be playing a podcast

Source public account: Jingzhe Research Institute (ID: jingzheyanjiusuo), exploring and discovering the new economy.