Traditional media companies are starting to embrace podcasting and it is starting to pay off. The New York Times has one of the most popular daily podcasts called the TheDaily and it launched in February of 2017. In this short amount of time, TheDaily now has well over 100MM downloads and has reached over 2 million listens per day. They have increased their staff from 4 to now 17. Since TheDaily launched, the amount of podcasts overall have more than tripled and other media companies like the Washington Post, Slate and ABC news have launched their own successful daily podcasts.
Canadian content company Rogers Media, today announce they acquired branded content creation platform PacificContent for an undisclosed amount. Rogers owns 29 TV stations, 23 “conventional and specialty television stations,” 56 radio stations and began expanding into the podcast space last year with the launch of its Frequency Podcast Network.
The future of podcasts will be similar to how the Internet evolved. As podcast technology continues to improve, this will help democratize the creation of podcasts where quality will improve and the amount of new audio content entering the space will accelerate rapidly. We will also see more and more short form audio podcasts enter the market with the proliferation of smart speaker devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home.