Podcasting's Hollowed-Out Middle Class

For as democratic as our medium is, podcasting isn't immune to the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, but is that hollowing out a natural or an unnatural phenomenon? And what are podcasters to do about it?

Hello and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me. Evo terror. Now, podcasting has some really good bench marking numbers, mostly provided us, provided to us by mr Rob Walsh, the vice president of podcast, or relations at Libsyn, liberated syndication, which is, I believe, the biggest hosting company for at least the independent podcasters.

And I think the sheer volume of podcasts and the number of podcasts are the biggest ones. Uh, so thanks. Thanks, Rob, for giving that every month. Rob goes onto a show that he does with a podcast, happiness, um, Wrangler Elsie Escobar, and gives us at the end of one of the episodes, the breakdown of the tears.

And Rob breaks it down by looking at Libsyn's numbers and tells us what the average number of downloads is for a podcast over the last 45 days. And then proceeds to tell us what the breakdown is for the top 20 so if your show's over X number, you're in the top 20 of all podcasters and then a bigger number to get you the top 10 and then five and two and then finally the top one.

And he's been doing that for years. So if you want to go back and see what percentage tier level you fit into at any given time based on your downloads after 30 ish or so days per episode, you can get that information very helpful. I used to report on it to my clients, but I've stopped because I'm not so sure it's telling us.

Well, it assumes we all have the same. Goal in mind in that is to have the biggest number one problem with it. Second problem is it's not really talking about, let me change the way I'm saying this whole thing cause I don't want to, I don't want to disparage it. It's a good number, but here's what we need.

I would much rather see, or maybe in addition to, I want to see a distribution chart and by a distribution chart, I mean I want to see the number of shows. At each of these points, maybe how many podcasts, what is the percentage of the network that has a listener base of, let's say 50 they get 50 downloads, how many number, what's the number of that, and then a hundred then one 15 all the way up until you get to the literally millions.

I want to know the number of podcasts. The number of shows in each one of those. And the reason I want to do that as simple, um, you've probably noticed a distribution chart. When you look at things like ratings and reviews, anything you look at on Amazon, Yelp, any of their ratings and reviews, places, you'll notice they've got an average number of three and a half stars, five stars, 4.29 stars.

Your Uber driver. That's great. That tells you one thing, but if you look deeper, if you click in, especially on Amazon, you click in, you can see the number of five star reviews, four star reviews, three star, two star, and one star reviews, and that'll show you those in a nice little graph. How many in each one of those, of course, they sum those up to get the average, but what you'll notice as you look at those graphs is the middle is almost always empty.

And that's because the people who rate and review content tend to rate things that they love or hate, not so much in the middle. So it's pretty natural to see a hollowed out middle when it comes to ratings and reviews. But that's a distribution chart and that's the kind of distribution chart I want to see in podcasting.

We don't have that distribution chart and podcasting, or if we do, I haven't seen it. And this is something that the podcast hosting companies could make for us. This is something that the third party tracking services like chartable or well, I'll stick with charitable could do for us if they wanted to, but they're not doing it and I really wish they would.

My assumption is if we were to look at that distribution chart, it would also look very hollowed out, and I'm not talking about ratings and reviews. I'm talking hollowed out by number of listeners. I think that when we looked at the total number of shows, we would see a big number, a really big number at the bottom, number of shows of the 900,000 podcasts we have now.

There'll be a large number of them that are on the low end of that spectrum. And then as you got larger, a number of listeners, as you went further to the right on that, you would see that number of shows drop precipitously. But as you reach the other extreme audiences that are very, very large, you'd see an upswing again.

Hence the hollowing out of the middle of podcasting. Now. I think that's an okay thing. I don't think there's anything really for us to do about it. I think we use it to understand that it's probably, it's likely hollowed out in the middle, and I think the reason that the middle is hollowed out, that things, that podcast tend to be clustered in the low end.

Which has the biggest cluster or all the way to the high end, which also has another large concurring cluster. I think there are some factors at play that pushed things either to the upper end or push things to the lower end, and I think they're gonna continue. So the things that I think are shifting podcasts to the upper end, our three one big podcasting companies are going to get more money.

Because this is working. They're making great content. People are more interested in the medium. They're getting more money, which means they can make more shows there. As their companies grow, as their teams grow, more shows come in, and those companies can now use their own internal network effect to raise those shows up.

To lift them up to the higher subscriber numbers, so they quickly move from no listeners to tens or hundreds of thousands of listeners very quickly. That's number one. Number two, as our listening apps and our directories get better, Apple podcast has got to redesign coming. Spotify just had a brand new redesign.

All of the smaller independent apps are growing. As they get better, they're going to showcase. The things people listened to on those apps, and those tend to be higher shows. That's automatically going to give more preference, more exposure to big shows, which will lift that all the way up. And then thirdly, big publications and media outside of podcasting are going to get excited about podcasting.

They're getting excited about podcasting. They will start covering podcasting more, I guess what kind of shows they're going to cover. The big ones, the big ones that are really, really great quality. Which drives even more ears to those big shows. So that's what causes things to shift to the upper end on the bulging lower end.

That's going to continue to increase as well. More people listening because more people who want to try podcasting, they're going to start with a show with an audience of zero. They will number two, find more tools out there to make it easier for them. The jump into podcasting just like anchored did several years ago.

You'll have more companies like that that make it easy to get into podcasting that don't necessarily, however, make it easier to make a really good show. And then thirdly, most interestingly, I think is the people who do make these smaller shows who are doing it for the fun, for the hobbyist out there.

They're okay with it. They're okay with their own little micro networks of people who like the little kinds of things that they do. That naturally keep their shows little, but it's okay. They're servicing the audience that they need to serve us with them. I think those six factors are, we're going to continue to drive the hollowing out a podcast.

He's middle-class and I don't think it's a bad thing. What are your fellow podcasters? Think about that. Have you shared your numbers with your others that you communicate with that you interface with in podcasting? I think you should do that. Find out where you all fit. Make your own distribution curve, especially the more people that you know about.

Tell them you found this episode of podcast pontifications interesting and see what their numbers are and put together your own little distribution graph so you can see where you stand out with your peers. That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast. Pontifications cheers.

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