How Fast is The Podcast Market Growing?

Video Transcript:

How Fast is The Podcast Market Growing?

We’re going to try something new, and we are calling this Whiteboard Wednesdays. And every Wednesday, we want to add educational content within the podcast industry to really help our community learn more about podcasting, podcasting tips, and so forth. So for our first Whiteboard Wednesday, we want to talk answer the questions, how fast is the podcast market Growing. We’re going to break this up into three separate whiteboards. But the first question that we have to ask ourselves is,

How many new podcasts are being added each year to the ecosystem?

We used Listen Notes data to calculate all of this, they do a great job. They say today, as of October 2020, there’s 1.7 million podcasts worldwide, and that’s already up from September of roughly six and a half percent from the previous month. So if you look at how many new podcasts have been added each year, let’s go ahead and look at that data.

So in 2015, there was approximately 58,000 new podcasts that were added in the entire year of 2015. If you look at 2016, that then jumped up to roughly 93,000 new podcasts being added. In 2017, again, that jumped to 125,000 new podcasts. Let’s look at 2018, jumped up to 193,000, 2019 was 309,000. Alright, and then so far in 2020, through October, there’s already 715,000 new podcasts being added in 2020.

If you look at the compounded annual growth rate since ’15, that’s 131% growth. So for 2015, there was 58,000 new podcasts being added every single year and that has jumped to so far in 2020, to 715,000 new podcasts, and this is accelerating rapidly.

If we ask another question,

What is the podcast revenue by year?

So we could say, well, that’s great. We’re adding new podcasts every single month and every single year, but how is that translating to podcast revenue when serving ads, host read ads, dynamically inserted ads, or programmatic ads into this audio content?

Let’s go ahead and look at the data for the same time period, 2015 through 2020. And in 2015, there was roughly $105 million in podcast revenue, according to Statista, and IAB. In 2016 that jumped up to $165 million. In ’17 it started to accelerate a little bit more, and it was $313 million. In 2018 that jumped up to $479 million. And then in 2019, that again jumped up to roughly $708 million in total revenue for podcasts. And in 2020, it’s anticipated to be greater than $1 billion in annual revenue coming from ad monetization within audio.

If we look at the compounded annual growth rate from 2015 to 2020, as it relates to revenue, that was a CAGR of 46% compounded annual growth rate. So clearly the amount of new podcasts that are being added is accelerating faster, but we’re also seeing a very healthy increase in the amount of revenue that podcasts, in general, can actually make. And that’s just because a lot more brands are getting into the space, we’re seeing new technological advances as it relates to audio technology and even with what Sounder is doing – working to democratize audio advertising, where regardless of size, if you have 10 downloads or 10 million downloads a month, you should have the tools to reach advertisers and monetize your audio content.

And then finally, let’s ask the question, well, that’s great, we have lots of podcasts, it’s generating revenue, but –

How many monthly podcast listeners are there?

That jumped up to 21% in 2016. That then jumped up to 24%, and then 26%, and then 32%.

And now in 2020, so far, it’s roughly 37%. 37% of the US population over the age of 12 listens to a podcast on a monthly basis. And if you factor that in, that’s roughly 104 million Americans within the US listening to a podcast on a monthly basis.

Now, we could actually break this up into the European Union and so forth. In fact, outside of the US, podcasting is actually accelerating faster in some countries, than even the US. But the ability to reach 37% of the US population, and that’s growing every single year, is pretty extraordinary.

Hopefully, this first How Fast is The Podcast Market Growing Whiteboard Wednesday was useful. Please give us your feedback in the blog comments below. We’ll see you next week.