Media is constantly evolving and innovating, and just as we went from paintings to photographs and photographs to films, gradually the collective media-consuming masses have moved from listening exclusively to radio and TV to enjoying podcasts as well. Breaking out on the scene nearly 2 decades ago, today there are over 2 million active podcasts and nearly 50 million podcast episodes available.
Podcasts aren’t a niche market – nearly 60% of US consumers listen to podcasts, and when people find shows they like, they really like them – 82.4% of podcast listeners spend more than 7 hours each week listening to their favorite podcasts.
While many individuals in the comedy, media, and entertainment industries have built or accelerated their career via podcasting, companies are starting to take notice of the trend and follow suit. Providing storytelling, interviews, and advice-column-esque content, brands are releasing podcasts with great success, garnering huge audiences. Studies show that more than half of podcast listeners are more likely to buy from a brand that was introduced to them via a podcast, so these podcasting companies are converting consumers as well as earning new fans.
The influence and reach of podcasts has developed relatively recently. You don’t have to be nearing retirement to be old enough to remember a time when podcasts didn’t even exist, and in the span of a little more than a decade this medium has taken hold of the zeitgeist and continues to gain popularity at an exponential rate. We take a look back at the history of podcasting to see how it got to the influential status it has today.
The Early Days
The earliest traces of a podcast-adjacent medium can be seen in the early 1980s, when “audioblogging” emerged in niche corners of the Web. These longform audio snippets of conversations and information didn’t enter the mainstream until the early 2000s, which was largely due to the emergence and dissemination of iPods which made the medium more accessible.
Adam Curry and Dave Winer are credited with inventing the medium and the original technology (a program called iPodder) to support it. The idea behind their original creation was to create content that would be similar to a radio broadcast, except it would be available “on demand” – you would be able to listen on your own time, rather than tuning into a network according to the program’s schedule.
They also wanted their “audioblogs” to feel more intimate and interactive than radio, with listeners sharing a community and common interest. Since the start of the medium, many fans have been able to interact with their favorite podcasts by writing in to the show, creating online forums dedicated to episode discussions, and easily sharing episodes with their friends, so podcasts are better at fostering a community than a radio show broadcast.
Ben Hammersby coined the term “podcast” in an article in the Guardian in 2004 to describe this new “audioblog” medium, and podcasting took off from there.
Adam Curry is often referred to as the “PodFather,” and went on to found a podcast promotion company. Winer developed the RSS Feed and more modern distribution programs, bolstering the industry with the technology that makes podcasting so accessible to creators and consumers today.
How-to books teaching the public about starting their own podcast started to hit the shelves around 2005, the same time that iPods were updated to support podcasting. Podcasts started to win awards in 2007, which was also the year that George W Bush released the first podcast-form presidential address. With big institutions recognizing podcasts as legitimate content and technology evolving to increase their availability and accessibility, it was only a matter of time before this medium became the pervasive phenomenon it is today.
Podcasting As We Know It
Comedians started to take advantage of the podcasting medium around 2009, and many of the artists who were pioneers on the podcasting frontier, such as Bill Burr, Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan, and Marc Maron, have built huge podcast followings that are still active and growing to this day.
NPR’s podcast “Serial” hit the RSS Feeds in 2014, which received a ton of attention from consumers all over the world. “Serial” won a Peabody Award, demonstrating that podcast content can and should be taken seriously, and was one of the first podcasts to break into the true crime genre, which is now a huge category of podcast shows.
Around 2017 news companies began to disseminate updates in podcast forms, such as the popular segment “The Daily” produced by The New York Times. Whether you’re a sports fan, science fiend, reality TV show addict, or a motivation and inspiration junkie, there’s a podcast show out there for everyone. The types of content available on podcasts is limitless now – there are even fictional podcasts that have gained a lot of attention and deals from TV and movie producers.
But the massive deals aren’t just reserved for the studio lots in Hollywood – Joe Rogan made headlines for weeks in 2020 when he signed his show, The Joe Rogan Experience, to a multi-million dollar exclusivity deal with Spotify. These kinds of industry events validate and prove that podcasting is not only a very legitimate form of media, but a lucrative one as well.
Podcasting and You
In a short period of time podcasting moved from a niche blogging trend to a billion dollar industry and one of the most popular ways for content creators and brands to communicate with their consumer base. Podcasting gives creators a lot of control and consumers an intimate, accessible, and consistent way to enjoy their favorite content.
It’s exciting to consider how much more this powerful but young industry will develop in the coming years. If you’d like to be a part of the innovation, reach out to us at [email protected]. With our development, production, and distribution suite of services, founding_media can help your podcast at every stage of the process so that you can take advantage of this medium to tell your story. Check out our network of podcasts here!
