Category: Featured Art

A MOST PECULIAR MACHINATION. The news was a long time coming. I’ve heard whispers of something like this since 2015, back when the rumors revolved around an internal WNYC strategy project with a curious codename: Pique. The initial story I heard spoke of a platform-oriented attempt to tackle the full stack of podcast problems, from discovery to distribution. Furthermore, the whispers say the move wasn’t meant to be limited to public radio: It would be for all podcasting, and it would be global. But the rumors came and went sporadically, and I was convinced at various points that it simply wouldn’t happen.

And then it did. The announcement dropped last Thursday with little public runup: a coalition of public radio organizations — NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ, and This American Life, which stands alone as a public benefit corporation — has acquired Pocket Casts, an Australian podcast app thought to be well liked among the podcasting community. A WNYC spokesperson later confirmed to me that the acquisition was indeed the result of the strategic work that the New York public radio station had been doing with Pique for several years now.

You can find relevant coverage at The Verge, NPR’s press room, and The Wall Street Journal, among numerous outlets that picked up the story. But here are the key details you should know:

• Pocket Casts will operate as an independent company separate and apart from any of the organizations that are part of the joint acquisition. An NPR spokesperson told me that the company will not operate as a nonprofit.
• The public radio coalition has brought in Owen Grovers, a former EVP and general manager at iHeartRadio and former VP of programming and marketing at Clear Channel, to serve as CEO of the new company.
• The current Pocket Casts team will be maintained. Founders Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic will remain in leadership roles at the company.
• The financial terms were not disclosed. It is perhaps useful to note that WNYC’s investment was partially made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the philanthropist Cynthia King Vance, the former chair of WNYC’s board of trustees.
• Pocket Casts’ existing business model is based on a one-time $3.99 app purchase. But a spokesperson told me that the new leadership team “will assess the business and revenue model for Pocket Casts over the coming weeks, with the goal of ensuring the platform remains financially sustainable. Decisions about the fee model will be made as part of that process.”
• Despite the review, the existing Pocket Casts leadership are promising a fundamental sameness (with more resources) despite the appointment of a former iHeartRadio exec as the new CEO, a new set of owners, and a rapidly shifting environment.
• Here’s the view on the app’s market share based on Ben Mullin’s reporting at the Wall Street Journal: “Pocket Casts accounts for about 2% of the downloads and streams of podcasts, according to Podtrac. Both NPR and WNYC said that Pocket Casts accounted for a larger share of podcast listening than PodTrac’s estimates, but declined to provide specifics.” That’s an important datapoint to know if your theory of the acquisition involves the group intending to buy a bought-in listener base.

Much remains unclear, with the most pressing question being: What, exactly, is the long-term strategic vision here? Only two insights can be found in the press push, through the Wall Street Journal writeup:

• WNYC chief digital officer Nathaniel Landau said that “the coalition of public media organizations wants to create a platform for independent creators to distribute and monetize their work, adding that they’re interested in applying the public radio membership model to podcasting writ large.”
• NPR chief digital officer Thomas Hjelm: “We need multiple shots on goal to address this delivery/distribution/discovery challenge…and I see this as another shot on goal.”

Both responses amount to a fairly vague picture of what’s to come, one where future Pocket Casts could resemble anything from a pure vessel for experimentation to a utility platform like Patreon to even something that looks like Radiotopia. That vagueness has led to reservations from certain circles in the podcast community, an expression of anxiety aimed at many possible outcomes including: the implementation of intrusive user tracking into the app, the commandeering of Pocket Casts’ discovery portals to privilege public radio programming over others, and the market-distorting effects of an entity that consolidates the powers of a few pretty prominent podcast publishing entities.

These concerns have understandable roots, and I’d argue they can be furthered contextualized as extensions of a much broader anxiety: that the open publishing nature of podcasting is working on a definitive countdown clock, that we’re collectively drifting towards a closed platform-oriented podcast environment, that this move is a specific instance of some groups anticipating this future and taking a step to either hedge against its inevitability — or speed it along. Which is to say, there’s a palpable Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse vibe to all of this, accentuating a feeling that maybe some folks should start stocking canned goods in the bunker.

That feeling is further exacerbated by just how unconventional this acquisition appears to be. To begin with, you have the entire group acquisition structure, which likely has to do more with conveying the symbolism of cross-system collaboration than anything particularly practical. This stratagem, whatever it turns out to be, will live or die by its governance, something that grows exponentially more complex with every new organization involved in its direction. (Leadership from all four coalition organizations will sit on Pocket Casts’ board.) And then you have the jumble of all the other stuff: the fact that Pocket Casts will not operate as a nonprofit, that it will be led by a commercial radio veteran, that you’re getting assurances from all parties that nothing significant is going to change, even though the point, logically speaking, is to usher in some amount of significant change.

Anyway, we’re drifting into tinfoil-hat territory here. It’s helpful, then, that NPR’s press team offered to link me up with Thomas Hjelm to ask some questions. (Hjelm, by the way, was WNYC’s previous chief digital officer before moving to NPR in April 2016. The connection is not insignificant.)

The following interview was conducted over email, and I’m reproducing both questions and answers here straight from the thread. As such, my questions will appear super shaggy — I wrote them in a hurry on Friday afternoon. The replies came back midday Monday.

[storybreak]

[conl]Hot Pod: So, really basic: What is the reasoning behind Pocket Casts? Why now? What changes in the market/market forces led to this decision?[/conl]

[conr]Thomas Hjelm: The partnership comprises four of the largest producers of podcasts in the market, and public radio as a whole continues to dominate the highest reaches of the podcast charts. That scale and impact puts us in a unique position to innovate and test new approaches to the discovery, delivery, distribution, and monetization of on-demand audio. Pocket Casts is one of the best and most popular apps on the market. Teaming up to acquire it, to support its founders and their team, gives us an excellent opportunity to advance that cause.

To put it another way, we want to help make podcast discovery a better experience for listeners and its delivery and distribution more valuable to podcast creators. With this partnership, we have the right combination of talents and assets to make the most of that opportunity.

The discussions that led to the acquisition started some time ago. It took time to find the right team and platform that would align with our goals and complement the other products in our collective portfolio, particularly NPR One. The Pocket Casts team not only had built a terrific product that engaged a large and passionate audience, but they shared our values and vision. We feel we’ve brought a very talented team into the extended family of public radio makers.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: What is the long-term goal in acquiring Pocket Casts? Do you have a specific vision of what this platform will be two years from now, or is that vision still being worked out and processed?[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: Pocket Casts certainly has a roadmap, which the leadership team is now refining. For now, while they’re doing that, I’ll emphasize two points. First, as excited and committed as we are to Pocket Casts, we also recognize that the world of audio is diverse. There is no one-size-fits-all listening experience. The audience is still growing and the technology evolving, we’re all experimenting and studying new behaviors of listening, and so we need to support products that expand our opportunities to learn and grow. Jake Shapiro of RadioPublic often talks about the need for “multiple shots on goal” as we explore this space. We fully respect and support that view.

Second, we’ll also look for ways in which the Pocket Casts team can work with their new cousins here in public radio, particularly the NPR One team, to develop and share new tools and technologies and techniques for engaging audiences. The spirit of this partnership is one of openness and mutual support.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: My immediate thought hearing about the acquisition was “Hulu, but for audio” — in that what we’ll end up seeing is a system-owned platform that provides a contained, public-radio–oriented podcast experience. Again, I think a lot is still up in the air, but is this possible future on the table?[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: We are not building a public-radio–centric podcast platform. We are keeping Pocket Casts open and independent to create opportunities for producers — from within public radio and well beyond — to reach new audiences.

The value proposition of NPR One is tied more closely to public radio. It extends the brand, its content is sourced largely from NPR as well as member stations and other producers within or adjacent to the system, and it supports the public radio model by driving listeners and prospective donors to stations. Pocket Casts, by contrast, is and will remain an open platform, where you can find content from practically the entire universe of podcast producers. It’s a complement to NPR One, as well as to the many other apps that are supported and branded by public radio stations and producers.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: I presume there’s a lot of discussion and planning over the next few weeks about specific changes that will be made to how Pocket Casts works and its business model, but what can you say right now about what won’t change and what will? I’m thinking specifically about questions re: user tracking, in-app advertising, and podcast discovery/promotion through the app.[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: Our first order of business is to preserve the superior UX that Pocket Casts users know and love. The app has been building a following for eight years, and one look at the ratings in the App Store or the activity on the Twitter feed confirms the continuing loyalty of that audience. Users are discriminating and they have other choices, so any discussion about evolving the product will start from there. Two areas we’re eager to explore are better tools for podcast creators to understand how their content is being consumed (so that they can better serve their audiences) and development of Pocket Casts on platforms beyond the smartphone. They launched a great Sonos app recently. It will be exciting to see where else they can go.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: Why Pocket Casts and not, say, Podcast Addict? I read that part of the thinking around the acquisition involves some exploration of adapting public radio membership models for podcasting. In that case, why not RadioPublic, which more explicitly builds for those goals?[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: We love this product. Pocket Casts is one of the best-designed, best-executed apps there is, and it’s long been on our radar. They’ve earned consistently high ratings in the App Store and Google Play, and they have a large and loyal audience. The Pocket Casts team has also innovated on new platforms that complement work that we at NPR and others in the system have been doing, like building a terrific Sonos app. They’re beginning to explore the voice-activation space, too.

Public radio has seen success in growing diverse revenue streams, and Pocket Casts will be eager to explore opportunities for membership and other revenue streams for all podcast creators. We’ll have more to say about the revenue model in the coming months, as the new leadership team gets into gear. But to the question of “why Pocket Casts,” it all starts with the team and the product and how it reaches and engages listeners. We feel we’re starting in a great place.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: So Pocket Casts will be run as a separate entity, but it won’t be a nonprofit. Will it be restructured as a public benefit corporation? And if it maintains its for-profit status, what does that allow Pocket Casts to do that you otherwise couldn’t?[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: The audio marketplace is ultra-dynamic, and we want to enable the company to adapt to new opportunities, whether through new product features, audience development approaches, business strategies, or investments. The leadership team of Pocket Casts will assess the business and revenue model over the coming weeks, with the goal of growing the platform and ensuring it’s financially sustainable, while also adhering to our nonprofit mission.[/conr]

[conl]Hot Pod: Why Owen Grover?[/conl]

[conr]Hjelm: [WNYC CEO] Laura Walker and I have known Owen since 2011, when iHeartRadio first partnered with New York Public Radio to distribute the WNYC and WQXR streams to new audiences. Owen brings us a host of skills and strong instincts, particularly in audience and business development, yet at the same time he understands and respects the mission and culture of public radio. We also felt that his talents nicely complement those of Pocket Casts’ two co-founders, Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic, of whom we are also huge fans and supporters. They agreed with us. It’s a great combination.[/conr]

[storybreak]

Many thanks to Hjelm for the interview.

Run that plinking tune back. From southwestern Virginia public radio station WVTF, previewing a recent event at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech with Serial Productions’ Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder:

A third season of ‘Serial’ is now in the works, with a scheduled launch of this fall. Snyder didn’t disclose what it’s about, says there will be an entirely different structure to the story.

“We’re really proud of that, we’re really happy for it,” she said. “But if it weren’t us, it would have been someone else who paved the way of podcasting.”

Cool.

This week in the revolving door:

• Amanda McCartney joins The New York Times’ advertising team in the newly created role of “Director, Audio & Podcasts,” where she will work to sell the organization’s growing audio advertising inventory and call on direct response podcast agencies. Previously, she was a sales director at the Slate Group, where she worked on podcast sales for Slate and Panoply — before the two divided up their sales structure — as well as branded podcasts.
• Carrie Lieberman has moved to iHeartMedia to serve as its VP of podcast revenue strategy. Previously, she was First Look Media’s director of content distribution, licensing, and business development. Lieberman served in that role for two years, where her duties included overseeing the company’s podcast portfolio stretching from The Intercept to Topic.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic. The view was a little different back in the summer of 2016, when I first started poking around on the podcast scene in the U.K. I wrote a short column on the subject then, finding the ecosystem there to be relatively underdeveloped on the consumption and advertising ends — a condition that, I thought, may have had something to do with the outsized shadow that the BBC casts over all things radio in the region.

I can’t quite tell if much has changed in U.K. podcasting writ large since then, but I can say that a good deal seems to be shifting at the BBC’s podcasting operations. In the past month alone, the BBC appointed its first commissioning editor for podcasts, Jason Phipps, and announced a partnership with Acast to monetize its podcast downloads outside of the U.K. (The latter is largely being read as a move to formalize a new revenue channel for the organization. Note that the BBC is funded in large part by annual licensing fees charged to U.K. citizens, with the rest being spread across public grants and various commercial services, among other things.)

These moves come on top of a new podcast strategy being implemented at the BBC — or, specifically, at the BBC World Service in English. The first indication of this new strategy surfaced during last summer’s RadioDays Europe conference in Copenhagen, when Jon Manel, the World Service’s first podcast editor, announced that the service would no longer use its podcast portfolio as a place for listeners to catch up on unaltered versions of existing radio programs. It was a tantalizing tidbit, but I wasn’t able to connect with Manel at the time to get a full view of what the organization was planning to do.

That changed last week, when we jumped on the phone to talk further about the BBC’s new podcast ambitions. A former investigative journalist who has been with the organization since 1994 — he tells me he was the first British broadcast journalist to report inside Guantanamo Bay — Manel was appointed as the World Service’s first podcast editor in early 2017. In our conversation, he was thoughtful and admirably judicious: There was much he wasn’t able to share at the moment, but he was more than willing to share what he could.

Manel begins with the past. Since 2004, the BBC’s practice has been to repackage all its radio programs into podcast form without any changes or edits to the experience. Some of these repackages, like Radio 4’s In Our Time and The Global News, did quite well (the latter reportedly brought in 11.3 million downloads in March), but most others, not so much. As previously mentioned, that practice has now been ended, and an effort is underway to cull those repackages down to a core group of performers, where they will be refined to work better as podcast experiences. It’s a familiar move, one that echoes a similar historical development at NPR.

But that’s mostly housekeeping. What new programming initiatives will Manel pursue, and what are his guiding principles? “We could just be making loads and loads of new podcasts and just throwing them out there, or we could make a small number and put a lot into that,” he said. “That’s my strategy: a smaller number of really thought-through, targeted podcast series.”

Manel’s efforts should be contextualized as part of a broader goal that’s been set by the BBC World Service: to expand its weekly audience by 10.7 million by 2020. And aside from commissioning podcast-first works that can broadly contribute to that goal, Manel also highlighted a parallel focus on reaching new audiences — or, as he puts it, “those who aren’t served as well by the BBC as we would like.”

That generally means young people and women, but it also means audiences from beyond the U.K.’s physical geography. “For me, the U.K. audience is very important for the World Service. But in terms of my goals, it’s looking beyond these shores and the rest of the world,” Manel said.

To illustrate this, Manel talked about a show his team is producing that’s specifically aimed at 18- to 24-year-old English speakers in India. He wasn’t able to say much about the project just yet, but he did note that it will feature “great stories which really matter to our target audience” and that it will be hosted by a popular Bollywood personality. That podcast is slated to drop sometime in the summer, and they are planning to carry out a marketing campaign that involves staging a number of live events at universities across India. “Podcasting in India exists, but it’s still pretty small,” he said. “You could say that they aren’t being well served by podcasting in general as well, so in a way we’re trying to give podcasting a good push in the region at the same time.”

It’s a shrewd move, and one that notably places direct bets on the strategic advantages podcasting can bring to a global organization like the BBC that linear broadcast channels cannot: namely, an internet-native capacity to be highly specific in identifying, serving, and developing a relationship with an audience without being bound to geographic and linear modes of consumption. A highly targeted initiative like this is made even more valuable by the fact that the BBC isn’t beholden to the same kinds of revenue pressures as for-profit podcast publishers or even American public radio, which relies on listener support funding that mostly comes after the organization has already delivered value. At the BBC, such programming experiments are, in a sense, “prepaid.” India is just the start, Manel tells me. He has some other ideas of things to try along these international lines, but he isn’t privy to share details about that at the moment.

The Indian podcast project strikes me as the most exciting of the BBC’s machinations, but attention should also be paid to the organization’s more conventional podcast efforts. You might’ve spotted Death in Ice Valley bouncing around the Apple Podcast charts recently, which is the BBC’s true crime podcast collaboration with the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. On its face, the show seems like a straightforward programming gambit that leans into a good deal of true crime podcasting’s genre conventions: a culturally-recognized cold case, a sense of participatory discovery, and so on.

But the podcast is also being used as a solid foundation for digital experiments. Manel tells me that Death in Ice Valley is already the BBC’s most successful podcast launch — though, again, he wasn’t able to publicly disclose numbers — but he also notes being impressed with the show’s efforts at creating a Facebook Group-led audience development campaign that loops listener suggestions back in to impact the show. It’s a move that’s been deployed elsewhere in podcast-land, but for a massive public broadcaster like the BBC, it’s a meaningful frontier.

Manel is currently preparing for a new commissioning round, where he will field ideas for the next podcasts to go under the BBC banner. I asked if he was looking for anything specific, or if there was anything in particular a potential proposal writer should be cognizant about. He tells me he has some guidance on what his team is looking for, but hesitates to state anything specific. He did say this, though: “Too often, I think there’s a danger that when there’s a really successful podcast out there, everyone tries to copy that.”

He adds: “When we first sat down with Death in Ice Valley, the team asked us: ‘What podcasts out there do you want us to base it on?’ And I said, ‘None, I want a podcast that isn’t like any other.'”

Some odds and ends:

• The appointment of Jason Phipps won’t affect Manel’s purview. “He’s handling domestic BBC, I handle World Service in English,” Manel said.
• As another testament to the BBC’s sprawling and complex organizational structure: Other departments, and other languages, are looking into modeling their own podcast efforts after what’s happening in World Service English. They will move at their own pace.
• The BBC appears to still be feeling its way through how it’s going to deal with podcast advertising. Even with the Acast deal in place, some shows, like Death in Ice Valley, will not carry advertising, given its status as a co-production with NRK.

Bites:

• Whipped up a “Best Podcasts of 2018 (So Far)” list last week. (Vulture) But let’s be real: The actual best podcast of the year so far is Wild Wild Country.
• Macmillan Publishers and Grammar Girl have forged a partnership with Stitcher Premium that will bring the entire Grammar Girl catalog — 600-plus episodes strong — behind the paywall. The podcast will also release bonus episodes exclusive to the platform every month.
• “Trader Joe’s podcast is weirdly popular on Apple right now.” (Fast Company) As always, Apple chart placement is not a direct indicator of popularity — but that said, the podcast did get enough activity to get up to the upper echelons. This anecdotal case study will likely power the branded podcast economy for several more moon cycles.
• Bloomberg is launching a new podcast that’ll serve as a six-part in-depth investigation into the gender pay gap. (Trailer)
• Local podcast watchers: Keep an eye on Best People, a new series about Illinois by a new nonprofit progressive news site called One Illinois. (Apple Podcasts)
• “Podcast network Radiotopia is expanding its member-paid benefits.” (Digiday)
• Cadence13 and Nielsen have a new study out on some aspects of the standard podcast listener’s purchase behavior. Probably something you’d want to check out if you sell podcast advertising for a living. (Medium)
• Revisionist History is back for its third season on May 17. (Twitter)
• Not directly related, but I found this very interesting: “Pandora Learns the Cost of Ads, and of Subscriptions.” (Wired)

ATLANTA MONSTER NUMBERS. Despite how you may feel about the true-crime podcast collaboration between HowStuffWorks and Tenderfoot — and from what I’ve been seeing, there are abundant feelings flying in all directions — the podcast is putting up considerable numbers for a limited-run series, according to data given to Fast Company.

At this point in time, we’re chiefly concerned about numbers. The article reports that “from January 5 to April 4, Atlanta Monster’s 12 episodes reached over 20 million downloads total (source: Podtrac).” Two points of context:

• The download data window — from January 5 to April 4 — spans across the entire active run of the ten-part podcast. The podcast, which released episodes weekly, debuted on January 5 and dropped its final installment on March 23.
• To break the data down into a baseline stat: across its active run, the podcast garnered slightly over half a million downloads per episode per month.

Over Twitter, Jason Hoch, head of new initiatives at HowStuffWorks, tells me that “a new episode would typically hit a half million downloads on its first or second day.” He also challenged the baseline stat, arguing that the podcast should be more appropriately viewed that as driving over 1 million downloads per episode in the first full month of that episode being available.

So do these numbers constitute a “runaway smash hit,” as Fast Company puts it? I generally try to hedge on hyperbole, and let’s remember that it’s hard to make concrete statements or comfortable apples-to-apples comparisons when assessing a show’s performance numbers.

But I will say that we have a decent prior, if we were so moved to attempt a comparison: the Los Angeles Times and Wondery’s true-crime bonanza Dirty John, which reportedly pulled in more than 7 million downloads in its first month, according to CJR. That podcast opted for a more aggressive rollout strategy, scattering its six-episode arc near daily across the span of a week, which means that across its active run and subsequent first month, Dirty John garnered slightly over a million downloads per episode per month.

Now, is this an appropriate way to compare two podcasts that operate within the same genre and are structured similarly? I’d say it’s the best we can do under the current limitations of podcast measurement and the lack of publicly available data for aspiring industry analysts. In any case, it’s yet another reflection of the convoluted hoops we need to jump through if any of us — producers, ad buyers, analysts, critics, so on — endeavor to get a clear sense on sizing for the purposes of strategy or further study.

Speaking of Wondery: The venture-backed Los Angeles podcast company recently struck up a number of partnerships to monetize the downloads it gets outside of the United States: DAX (Digital Audio Exchange) in the United Kingdom, Whooshka in Australia, and TPX in Canada. Here’s the press release.

For those unfamiliar: Most U.S. advertisers aren’t particularly interested in reaching audiences in, say, Japan. So you can make more money if you can find Japanese advertisers who are. After all, if this newsletter had a classified listing for a product that can only be shipped to American readers, there’s only so much the manufacturer can gain from having the ad spotted by an Australian Hot Pod reader (of which there are quite a few). It’s the little things that make a business, y’know?

Anyway, something else to note about Wondery: The company has launched paid premium listening program, Wondery+, where subscribers pay $7 a month for an ad-free listening experience and additional material. It’s less like Gimlet’s membership program, and more like PodcastOne’s premium tier.

Between the overseas monetization push and the new paid program, it seems like Wondery is making a hard run at expanding their revenue channels.

Homo podonomicus. This is one of those moments where I cosplay as an Edison Research blog. Last week saw the release of The Podcast Consumer 2018, the breakout report that Edison Research usually produces as a followup to its annual Infinite Dial study. As always, I encourage you to check out the report and watch the webinar in full, but here are three themes that most stood out to me:

(1) The deep gets deeper. An observation that’s long been made about podcasting is that people who like podcasts tend to really, really like podcasts. (Wistfully thumbs through my hundreds of podcast subscriptions, gazes at the tumbleweeds of decrepit earphones around me.) That seems to only be more true with the passing of time.

To wit:

• Among weekly podcast consumers — the particularly engaged subset of listeners — the mean listening time is now 6 hours and 37 minutes, up from 5 hours, 7 minutes last year. In the webinar, Edison SVP Tom Webster suggested that this might have something to do with the rise of the daily podcast genre, which we can perhaps more broadly read as what happens when the supply-side delivers new innovative programming formats that helps broaden (and deepen) consumption behaviors. It’s an intriguing idea, but I suspect that I might have to do little more work on this hypothesis in the future.
• A related stat that was previously mentioned but bears repeating: Among weekly podcast consumers, the average number of podcasts consumed per week is now 7, up from 5 last year.

(2) The pipeline. This slides tells a few stories:

Most importantly, it can be read as an illustration of the medium’s ability to attract, convert, and retain new listeners over time — particularly on its right side, which tells a story of the medium being moderately successful at converting new listeners into engaged weekly podcast consumers.

(3) A zero-sum game? Perhaps the most interesting idea raised in the webinar is the notion that podcasting may well be locked into a zero-sum competition with other audio sources for new listeners. This is premised on the fact that, based on Edison Research’s “Share of Ear” research, people spend an average of 4 hours every day listening to audio in general — a number that has stayed flat for several years now.

Which is to say: if we assume that the overall number of hours consumers will spend listening to audio will continue to stay the same, then podcasting, in its pursuit to grow, will have to convince these consumers to give up some of the time they’ve previously spent listening to say, terrestrial or internet radio.

And there is evidence that podcasting has been able to effectively take food off the plates of its peers: Edison Research has found that the medium has doubled its share of the average American listener’s audio diet over the past four years. This aggressive picture of expansion is further bolstered by what we know of the consumption veracity of those who become active podcast consumers. Edison Research has another stat backing this up: Among active podcast listeners, podcasting now makes up the majority of audio consumed on their smartphones (52 percent).

Of course, this configuration of a zero-sum competition may be rendered inapplicable if listeners were somehow convinced to increase their overall audio consumption hours. (I’m vaguely reminded of the slightly ridiculous but actually not-so-hyperbolic declaration by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings that the video streaming service’s true competition is sleep.) The obvious suspect to potentially lead such a structural change: the rise of the smart speaker, which is actually the rise of voice-first computing.

Twin arcs. Before I launch into my whole thing about smart speakers this week, let me single out these three data points from the Podcast Consumer 2018 report:

• Over the years, the preferred listening method among monthly podcast consumers has shifted from the desktop to the mobile device. In 2018, 76 percent of monthly podcast consumers list smartphones as the device used most often for listening. which is up from 42 percent in 2013.
• Active podcast consumers are more likely to own smart speakers than the general American population, and this trend has only grown over time. In 2017, 11 percent of monthly podcast consumers report being smart speaker owners, against 7 percent of the general population. In 2018, 30 percent of monthly podcast listeners own smart speakers, against 18 percent of the general population.
• Intriguingly, among podcast listeners who own a smart speaker, only 25 percent of them use the device to listen to podcasts. In the webinar, Edison SVP Tom Webster delivered a succinct summary of why this may be a little disconcerting: “They have this device that we know increases overall audio consumption, but increasing the consumption of podcasts is a bit of an open question.”

So, to pull all of this together, we have a situation in which:

• the current arc of podcast consumption seems distinctly tethered to the smartphone, and
• we face a potential arc where podcast consumption and smart-speaker adoption never actually reconcile.

With these points, let’s raise the line of inquiry: What will be the thing that reconciles podcast consumption with smart speaker adoption? Is there any guarantee that such reconciliation will happen? And what does it mean if there isn’t?

I’m still processing, so I don’t have a clear grasp on a position just yet. But I am thinking about the HomePod.

The new new thing. I missed this development last week, but it’s a noteworthy one: Apple has reportedly lowered sales forecasts and manufacturing orders for the HomePod following what appears to be a slowdown in sales, according to a Bloomberg report.

The HomePod was supposed to be Apple’s triumphant entry into the rapidly expanding and increasingly competitive smart-speaker market, which is currently led in the United States by the Amazon Echo and, to a smaller extent, the Google Home. But it had to deal with playing intense catchup after officially rolling out in February (following delays). Meanwhile, Amazon’s Echo line has been out since November 2014, while the Google Home has been sold since October 2016. Apple ultimately opted for a strategy built around a significantly higher-end (and consequently pricier) product that emphasizes superior sound quality — in many ways a choice that’s consistent with the storied technology company’s approach in the past.

The state and future viability of the HomePod is a subject for the Apple-blog set, and I’ll leave the matter to them. But the HomePod’s fate is significant to our interests, given Apple’s vaunted position in the podcast publishing community. After all, one could argue, as I have, that the story of podcasting’s growth over the past decade is largely the story of specific choices made by Apple, from its inclusion of the format into the iTunes ecosystem to its default bundling of a dedicated podcast app with iOS. Furthermore, Apple continues to be a strong influence over industry fortunes and appearances, primarily through the curatorial power it expresses through the Apple Podcasts homepage as well as the extensively scrutinized (and often inadequately understood) charts system. (Remember: it’s a hotness meter, not a bigness meter.) All of which reflects just how much mainstream podcast consumption is still currently facilitated through Apple products in general — and Apple smartphones in specific.

We are fleshy human beings who need physical devices to consume media (for now, anyway), and it’s not necessarily a given that the smartphone will continue to persist in its current state of primary. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, but my personal suspicion is that a good chunk of the future of media consumption in general — pardon the overused concept construction — will involve smart speakers, and what smart speakers portend: voice-first computing, now masquerading around with the more innocuous label of “voice assistants.”

This is, I think, low-key the most interesting story to track in podcasting. If Apple has long been the structural proponent of podcasting’s history, and smart speakers are likely the structural facilitator of audio publishing’s future, what does it mean for podcast/audio publishers when Apple seems shaky in figuring out its place in the smart speaker future?

Further reading. This is the point where I customarily plug my previous columns on smart speakers and podcasting here, here, and here. And I quite liked this piece from Christina Bonnington, writing for Slate:

What happens next is up to Apple. It can open up HomePod to integration with third-party streaming music players — and improve Siri integration with those services — or it can keep the HomePod tightly locked into the iTunes and Apple Music ecosystem. While the iPod saw tremendous popularity in its heyday, it was a different time with far fewer players in the digital music space. Apple can’t ignore apps like Spotify and hope that its speaker will see the same level of success as its cheaper, more fully featured competitors. The HomePod needs to embrace today’s leading audio services rather than shut them out, or it’ll never grow beyond a niche product.

Related reading: Google product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen talked to the Canadian branded-podcast studio Pacific Content’s content marketing blog about their efforts towards cultivating greater podcast listening within the Google ecosystem, which includes: a native listening experience within the Google Search app (something that’s been spotted since mid-March), meaningful integration with Google Assistant, and a goal of “getting to the point where twice as many people are listening to podcasts,” most of whome “are not going to be people who listen already today.”

This week, elsewhere. Over at Vulture, I reviewed Gimlet’s latest audio drama, Sandra. As a standalone experience, I thought it was interesting enough, but deeply incomplete. As an artifact of a much wider story about the life and times of the podcast industry, it’s wild!

I also wrote a behind-the-scenes look at The New York Times’ first serialized narrative podcast, Caliphate — which is absolutely amazing, by the way. Two quick things: (1) the series has a really strong opening, and it’s a little surprising how uncommon that is; and (2) it’s funny how the non-narrated format in nonfiction podcasts — that is, one where the entire experience is diegetic, contrasting the conventional structure where the host or storyteller speaking directly to the listener — remains relatively uncommon.

Introducing: Ask A Podcast Lawyer. I’ve been thinking about doing this one for a while now. As the podcast community continues to industrialize, I’ve been getting more reader questions that go beyond my technical expertise but are nonetheless important to tackle in some way or another.

So I figured, why not phone-a-technical-expert? Let me introduce you to Lindsay W. Bowen, a partner with Cowan, DeBates, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP (CDAS), who works on the firm’s podcasting group representing podcasters, networks, production companies, and advertisers in everything from acquisition and production legal to book and TV sales. Bowen was kind enough to agree to participate in this hare-brained idea.

Without further ado, here’s the first Ask a Podcast Lawyer question, which comes from an inquiry sent sometime last week:

Let’s say you’re a small podcast that has an advertising contract with a moderately big podcast network. You’re still in the middle of the contract, but the network has stopped paying you on time. Maybe the network hasn’t been paying you at all. What are your legal options?”

– Ernie Ford from Tennessee (not their real name, not their real state)

I’ll let Lindsay take it from here:

DISCLAIMER: This is not legal advice, and there is no attorney-client relationship between Hot Pod readers and CDAS or any of its lawyers. Any individual matter depends on its unique set of facts and you should consult an attorney about yours. Also, the links are for illustration only, and we don’t endorse the sites or their content. Finally, this is written in an attempt to honor the house style of Hot Pod, which has got a little kick to its voice. Don’t judge me — I’m usually appropriately boring.

Dear Ernie,

TL;DR — Look at your contract and read the termination provision carefully. Also, look for an audit clause.

Sorry to hear you’re not being paid properly for loading your 16 tons. I’m sure you’ve written the network about this. If you haven’t — you should probably do it soon. You need to establish a written record now (and maybe there has been some dumb mistake or problem with the accounting people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). If you can afford a little lawyer time, it’s best to get her input first, so you don’t write anything now that hurts your position later. And if you don’t get a response, she can follow up and ratchet up the pressure.

Because you’re a small podcast, there’s probably not enough money at issue to make litigation worth it. But look at the monetary requirements for small-claims court in the applicable state. It may still not be worth your time, but winning feels good.

The most cost-effective outcome might be finding another network. There are a lot of good guys in podcasting. But your contract’s termination provision might have restrictions that say under what circumstances you can and cannot end the relationship. Check to make you are not buying yourself a problem by trying to walk away when you don’t have the right. That being said, not getting paid at all will usually be a material breach that will allow you to “fire” the network.

PRO TIP: Many royalty or revenue share-based entertainment contracts have an audit provision that gives the artist/rightsholder/David Lee Roth the right, usually once a year, to hire an accountant to go to the company’s physical location and examine the books. Look for a fee-shifting clause — commonly, if there has been an underpayment of 5% or more, the company will have to pay your accountant. Everyone should negotiate to try for an audit provision with a such a clause. That way, even where the threat of litigation might be a bit of an unloaded gun, the prospect of an accountant nosing around — potentially on the company’s dime — will get that follow-up letter read by the right people and get you paid.

Cheers,

Lindsay

Bites:

• Youth Radio, the award-winning Bay Area nonprofit that primarily works with young people from underprivileged communities, is developing a new magazine-style podcast that will both target and be produced by folks in their late teens/early twenties…and they’re looking a co-host. (Website)
• “David Chang Partners With Bill Simmons for Ringer Podcast.” (Variety) Hit me with that Ugly Delicious action.
• Detour, Andrew Mason’s augmented reality walking tour app, has sold its technology and content to Bose. According to a note the company sent out last night, the service will shut down after May 31 while Bose pursues new partners to host the Detour tours as part of its upcoming augmented reality platform.
• “The next Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook will go to podcasters first, and you can listen in.” (Polygon) Really smart bit of community engagement — and targeted marketing!
• Sarah Larson’s latest: “‘Trump, Inc.’: A True-Crime Podcast About The President’s Business Dealings.” (The New Yorker)
• “Can a Woman’s Voice Ever Be Right?: From the Roman Forum to the 2016 campaign trail, anxiety over what women sound like is part of our cultural DNA.” (Jordan Kisner, writing for The Cut)
• R.I.P., Carl Kasell. (NPR)

INFINITE DIAL CANADA. The Great North gets its own report from Edison Research and Triton Digital for the first time, and it’s long overdue. You can read the whole thing here, but I’m going to break out the most interesting data points with some comparisons to the U.S.:

Podcasting:

• The share of Canadians that listened to podcasts within the last month — the key track I follow — is 28 percent, which is three percentage points higher than the U.S. Keep in mind of the absolutes: Canada’s population is a fraction of the United States’.
• However, familiarity with the term “podcasting” is slightly lower: 61 percent of Canadians, three percentage points lower than the U.S.
• For weekly Canadian podcast listeners, the average number of podcasts consumed per week is five. In the U.S., it’s seven.

Smart speakers:

• Smart speaker ownership in Canada (8 percent) is less than half of that in the U.S. (17 percent).
• This stands out to me: Canadian awareness of the Google Home (55 percent) is considerably higher than that of Amazon Alexa (46 percent). Among Americans, awareness of the Amazon Alexa is a whopping 70 percent over Google Home’s 56 percent.
• This likely has to do with Google Home having a few months worth of a headstart over the Amazon Echo in Canada. Here are the ownership breakdowns: Among Canadians who own a smart speaker, 63 percent own Google Home but not Amazon Alexa, while 30 percent own an Alexa but not a Google Home. A meager 7 percent own both.

Audio brands:

This section is chock full of revealing little insights. Most notably:

• Given that Pandora is not available in Canada, Spotify leads in most usage (26 percent) and awareness (64 percent). But it’s also remarkable to see just how much Apple Music gains in the Pandora vacuum: most used by 16 percent of Canadians versus 10 percent of Americans.
• In the absence of Pandora, Stingray is ascendant, a testament to Canadian industry. (Most used audio brand among 14 percent of Canadians.)
• iHeartRadio’s Canadian footprint isn’t nearly as strong as in the States. Awareness among Canadians is a mere 43 percent, down over 20 percentage points from its awareness level among Americans. Only 3 percent of Canadians listened through iHeartRadio in the past month, while the share of Americans is 11 percent.

One more thing: Note the relative absence of Amazon Music as a prominent audio brand in Canada (42 percent awareness, lumped in with “Others” in the most used audio brand survey), and, conversely, the relative strength of Google Play Music in the country (58 percent awareness, most used audio brand among 14 percent of Canadians).

I’d argue this is directly related to the shape of smart-speaker ownership in the country — where Google Homes are more dominant than Amazon Echos — and a further expression of how smart-speaker adoption drives listening behaviors towards the platforms that are bundled with them by default. To repeat my conclusion from the last time I wrote about this: “That’s the upside to the fight to figure out the ecosystem: to reap the benefits of becoming the default presence, brand, or experience on this rapidly-growing device category.”

Original-recipe radio:

From my writeup on the recent American Infinite Dial report: “The share of Americans aged 18-34 who don’t own a radio receiver in the home is now 50 percent. A decade ago, in 2008, that share was six percent.”

The situation is about the same in Canada. For Canadians in that age group, the share is 51 percent.

“Pandora CEO is doubling down on podcasts,” writes Yahoo Finance’s JP Mangalindan. The article contains the second public mention of Pandora CEO Roger Lynch’s intent to build the “Podcast Genome Project,” the on-demand audio equivalent of the personalization engine that it has built for music consumption. The first was this Variety article, published back in January.

From Mangalindan’s piece:

If Pandora pulls off its podcast ambitions, it would be a significant step for improving how people discover podcasts and how advertisers target a newer demographic via streamed content. As it currently stands, competitors like Apple Music and Spotify offer podcast charts to scroll through, but they’re not personalized to a person’s tastes.

“There’s nothing personal with that stuff,” Lynch explains. “It’s just what everybody else does. That’s what music was. You know to look at the Billboard chart. OK, what’s popular? And then Pandora came out and said we need discovery. That hasn’t happened yet in podcasts, but we’re going to make that happen.”

Yeah, okay. Let’s see what happens.

Reeling in. The New York Times announced last week that it is bringing Still Processing in-house. The conversational podcast hosted by Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris was previously produced by Pineapple Street Media, who delivered over 60 episodes across the last year and a half.

Still Processing will now be handled by Neena Pathak, who joins the Times from BuzzFeed. Pathak started work yesterday.

It’s worth noting that the Times still has two podcasts that aren’t produced in-house: Modern Love and Dear Sugars, both co-productions with the Boston public radio station WBUR.

The announcement also listed two other new hires: Jessica Cheung, who joins from NPR as an associate producer for The Daily, and Stella Tan, who started yesterday as a news assistant embedded in the audio team.

Another post-Feral Audio switch out: Doughboys, a former Feral Audio podcast, has joined the Headgum network instead of transitioning over to Starburns Audio. In case you haven’t been following this thread, here’s the background.

A curious development at Patreon. The membership platform company announced last week that it has added Goli Sheikholeslami, CEO of Chicago Public Media, to its board of directors. “At WBEZ, Goli has grown their membership over 30% during her tenure at the company,” Patreon CEO Jack Conte wrote in the post announcing the move. “I’m psyched to continue learning from her experience running media companies and building successful membership programs.”

Patreon primarily targets creators looking to develop direct relationships with their audiences and is a prominent option among independent podcasters looking to build out membership support structures within their business models. Notable users include Chapo Trap House, which pulls in over $97,000 a month through the platform; Last Podcast on the Left, almost $35,000 a month; and Jesse Brown’s Canadaland, over $20,000 a month.

The company isn’t without its operational controversies. In December, Patreon implemented a new payment model that some creators argued penalized smaller donations in favor of bigger ones. The change was later walked back.

Going for that Players’ Tribune money. There’s an interesting trend of podcast networks partnering up with professional athletes — ones who are still on active rosters and not, like, retired folks on the media circuit — which, on the one hand, is pretty attention-grabby, and on the other, kinda seems like a tricky media product to put together? It’s a rare media-savvy athlete that’s able to cross over from knowing how to play the media towards knowing how to play media.

Anyway, three examples of note in recent months:

• Barstool Sports building an hour-long podcast around Charlotte Hornets center Frank Kaminsky.
• Cadence13 setting up shop for Portland Trail Blazers guard C.J. McCollum.
• From a while back: The Ringer producing a show with Philadelphia 76ers guard J.J. Redick.

Meanwhile, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant posted his fifth appearance on the Bill Simmons podcast a few weeks ago, and I gotta say: Semi-adversarial compositions make for good content, fellas.

This week in political podcasting. I completely missed both these cycles when they were happening, but in case it’s relevant to your interests:

• There was an extended, public, podcast-centered beef between Vox’s Ezra Klein and Sam Harris, the famed atheist public intellectual and host of the Waking Up podcast. There’s a lot going on here, and if you’re interested, go here and here. But suffice it to say, political blog jousting has firmly migrated into podcasting…
• …which was an idea that appeared in something the conservative columnist Matt Lewis wrote last week on the Kevin Williamson–Atlantic controversy, which apparently hit its climax via a podcast-related discovery.

Blog culture follows where the bloggers go, and the bloggers are here in podcast-land. And/or large media companies. People move, y’know?

Global. “In a world where about 6 billion people don’t speak English, we don’t want to treat language as a barrier for the stories our clients want to tell,” Martina Castro tells me. “Especially considering that podcasting is inherently a global and (mostly) free medium.”

Castro is the CEO of Adonde Media, a young globally-oriented podcast company that works with clients — which includes brands, traditional media companies, and eventually, she hopes, other podcast networks — to create audio shows that match with the language of their audiences. One of the original co-founders of Radio Ambulante, Castro started the company last year through Startup Chile, a seed accelerator created by the Chilean government housed in Santiago.

The way she tells it, Adonde Media comes out of her experiences getting to know the podcast community in Latin America since she moved to the region in 2015 after spending over a decade in American public radio. “It reminded me of what it was like for producers back in the U.S. before the Serial boom, or what it was like in the early years of Radio Ambulante, when we couldn’t yet prove there was a demand for what we wanted to create,” she said. “We saw then what is still true about the Spanish-speaking world — we not only want to hear more diverse and complex stories about ourselves, but we are also hungry to tell those stories.”

Her original pitch for Adonde Media was a company that focused on “bilingual” podcasts. The company’s first major client was Duolingo, the language-learning platform, which approached Castro just as she was starting her time at Startup Chile last year.

“They were looking for help in creating a podcast that would help their intermediate level Spanish-learners continue improving their comprehension skills and vocabulary,” Castro said. “The goal — as is with all of Duolingo’s products — was to make something entertaining that would make you almost forget you were learning.”

The end result was the Duolingo Spanish Podcast, a show built around personal essays that were delivered in Spanish but peppered with injections of English-language context. When asked, Duolingo reps declined to provide download numbers, but they replied: “We’ve been really happy with the performance of the Duolingo Spanish Podcast…we were thrilled to see it hit No. 1 overall and it remains in the Top 5 in the education category. More importantly, we’re getting great feedback from Duolingo users and podcast listeners.”

The reps added: “I’d say our first foray into podcasting has surpassed our expectations and we’re actively working on pre-production for season 2 now.”

With a successful project under its belt, Adonde Media had itself a solid start, but Castro eventually felt the need to re-articulate its value proposition. “We started out describing ourselves as a bilingual podcast production company, but I learned that this was a bit confusing to people. Some told me they weren’t sure if we were exclusively working on projects that involved two languages, or if I was translating podcasts,” she said. The solution involved a shift towards an idea of a “global” podcast — which, in turn, evokes a broader, more intriguing concept of a global podcast market.

With that reframing in mind, Castro tells me that her team, now 12 strong, has a couple of projects cooking in the oven. Most notably, the company is working with TED on their upcoming Spanish-language expansion podcast, TED en Español, which is set to launch in collaboration with Univision on April 26. They’re also working on a French pilot as well as their first original podcast.

“I can’t say much about those projects right now, but the goal is to launch the original podcast in the Fall,” Castro added.

On the challenges of developing non-English podcasts. Given the centrality of that question to Castro’s work with Adonde Media, I posed it to her in our email exchanges. And much like last week’s mini-profile on Lauren Shippen, Castro’s reply was lengthy and comprehensive, so I’m going to crib the same move and run the whole thing.

Here we go:

I am going to focus on Spanish-language, because that’s the sector I’m most familiar with at this point, but I think in all cases I’d say you need to start with creating amazing content. I see two problems: One, there aren’t enough high-quality podcasts to start. Second, for the ones that are pretty good, there’s no marketing or promotion so listeners can find them. It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem: you need to create high-quality podcasts and give them a proper marketing budget for people to want to listen, but enough people need to listen before companies will invest the money necessary in making high-quality podcasts. But let’s back up even further — the word “podcast” is still not even understood in most parts of Latin America! This is a place where Apple has way less reach, so the term “pod” is just lost on them (I have landed on describing it as the Netflix of audio).

But there are promising signs. In just the last three years we have seen a lot more interest in podcasts from the Spanish-speaking world. BBVA, one of the largest banks in Spain, recently launched not one podcast, but a whole channel. Companies such as Claro and Telefónica are starting to sponsored podcasts in Argentina, and the launch of Slate’s gabfest in Español and of Spotify’s Viva Latino show that big players are interested in investing in podcasts in Spanish. There are also already branded podcasts in Spanish, notably No Ficción from Penguin Random House Books.

Also, the content is getting GOOD. In Chile, I’m a fan of Las Raras and Relato Nacional, both narrative journalism podcasts. Posta.fm and Lunfa in Argentina are rather well-established podcast networks, not to mention Podium in Spain which produces the hit podcast El Gran Apagón, a sci-fi fiction podcast that had 150,000 listens in its first month when it launched in 2016.

But I won’t lie, non-English podcasts still have a long way to go. Few of the producers I’ve met are making a living off of their podcast. And in terms of listeners, anecdotally, I can tell you that most podcast listeners whom I’ve met in Chile and Uruguay listen to podcasts in English. This was supported by the first collaborative audience survey of Spanish-language listeners that we conducted via Podcaster@s last year (EncuestaPod 2017) where we learned 47% of those surveyed listen to podcasts in English.

The best recipe for combating the chicken and egg problem is — and I’ll hit you with another cliché — a perfect storm of things coming together. We need a combination of growth in smartphone use (at 56%, Chile is leading the way for Latin America), cheaper streaming, better financed production of high-quality content, and big enough players entering the game to inject the necessary marketing dollars necessary to bring the term “podcast” into the Spanish lexicon. I actually don’t think we are too far from that.

Bites:

• NPR creates two digital leadership roles, Current reports. The first is Kerry Lenahan, who joins as VP of product, and the second is Joel Sucherman, who is promoted to VP of new platform partnerships. (Current)
• Staying in public radio, Seattle member station KUOW is reorganizing its drive-time staffing — which includes eliminating seven positions — to switch up the way it’s serving the time slot. There’s a lot going on in this report, including an internal memo stating that “NPR’s research has shown people are no longer relying on ‘Morning Edition’ for their first news in the morning” and pushback from NPR to that memo. (Current)
• Fresh off the heels of launching its first audio drama, Marvel is reviving two of its old insider podcasts — This Week in Marvel and Women of Marvel — and rolling out a new one: Marvel’s Voices. (Newsarama)
• On the adaptation beat: “Come Sunday,” a film adaptation of the 2005 This American Life episode “Heretic,” is hitting Netflix this Friday. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Martin Sheen, Condola Rashad, and Lakeith Stanfield.
• Smart-speaker watchers: Slate tech writer Will Oremus interviewed Al Lindsay, VP of Alexa Engine Software at Amazon, for his podcast recently. Lots of intriguing stuff in there. (Slate)
• “Spotify’s first hardware device might be this music player for your car.” (The Verge) Apparently, the company has some sort of announcement event scheduled for April 24?
• PRX’s Podcast Garage is working on crowdsourcing a list of Boston podcasts to promote local shows and introduce Boston listeners to new content. They’re calling it the Neighborhood Podcast List. Cool! (Podcast Garage)
• “Podcasting’s New World: Groupies, Stage Fright and Sold-Out Shows.” (The Wall Street Journal)

[photocredit]Photo illustration of Pierre Eliot Trudeau wearing AirPods based on photo by Sherwood411 used under a Creative Commons license.[/photocredit]

WONDERY RAISES $5 MILLION IN SERIES A. The round was led by Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Advancit Capital, with the participation of BAM Ventures, Watertower Ventures, BDMI, and Fox Networks Group. It’s worth a reminder that Hernan Lopez, Wondery’s CEO, is the former head of Fox International Channels, and Fox invested in the initial rollout of the company.

The Hollywood Reporter was given the exclusive. Note the following line: “Los Angeles-based Wondery has focused on building a pipeline of projects that can be adapted into film and television projects. It has optioned four of its series, including Sword and Scale and Tides of History, which are both set at Propagate Content.”

This makes explicit what has long been assumed about Wondery, and it is consistent with what appears to be an emerging content strategy for the company: rolling out anthology podcasts with broad themes (Business Wars, American History Tellers) that’s able to flexibly accommodate numerous stories to be tested for adaptation.

With this, Wondery joins Gimlet as two venture-backed content-first podcast companies whose growth propositions — at least, as articulated in their respective Series A fundraising rounds — are premised to some considerable degree on building dependable adaptation pipelines.

Does this suggest an environment in which intellectual property-development is a necessary key when it comes to unlocking further venture capital funding for production-oriented podcast companies? We’ll see.

On a related note: Lerer Hippeau and Advancit Capital also participated in the Series A funding round of Crypt TV, a digital network focused on developing horror and genre content. The Hollywood Reporter’s writeup notes that the company is looking at ways to brings its intellectual property to new formats, including podcasts.

Executive shuffle at Gimlet. For those keeping tabs:

• Caitlin Kenney is Gimlet’s new vice president of programming, shifting away from her previous role as vice president of new show development. Kenney was one of Gimlet’s earliest hires, joining the company in April 2015. She was also an OG Planet Money producer during the early Alex Blumberg-Adam Davidson era.
• Nazanin Rafsanjani is shifting away from her role as Creative Director at Gimlet Creative, the company’s branded content division, to take Kenney’s place as vice president of new show development. She begins the new role in two weeks.
• Annie-Rose Strasser joins Rafsanjani’s team as the new director of partnerships, acquisitions, and internal development. She was previously an editor in the company.
• The company will soon begin searching for a new creative director for Gimlet Creative. For now, Nicole Wong, a senior producer on the team, will serve as interim director.

These personnel shifts come as Gimlet rethinks its approach to new program development. An all-staff email circulated earlier this year emphasized a focus on “Fiction; Collaborations; and New Formats, like Chompers for Alexa.”

The company’s spring slate is due to be announced soon.

Night Vale Presents adds another show to its roster: Drew Ackerman’s Sleep with Me, the super-great, super-weird podcast designed to help lull listeners to sleep with surreal, semi-stream-of-consciousness stories. Sleep with Me was previously on Feral Audio before the network abruptly ceased operations in December following abuse claims levied at its founder, Dustin Marshall. Several podcasts from the network have since migrated over to Starburns Audio, which was formed by Feral Audio CEO Jason Smith in the wake of the controversy, but it appears here that Ackerman has chosen to do otherwise.

It’s a good fit. Night Vale Presents is doubling down on its eccentricities, and Sleep with Me most definitely falls well within that style. Groovy.

Pod-to-broad updates.

(1) Conservative enfant terrible Ben Shapiro is taking his podcast act to the established right-talk talk radio universe, where it will be repackaged into an hour-long format for the 5 p.m. slot in seven markets including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta. Westwood One is syndicating the program and announced that advertising time has been sold out. Broadcast began yesterday. Politico has the writeup.

According to Westwood One, the podcast version of The Ben Shapiro Show apparently brings in 15 million downloads per month. It publishes every weekday. For the record, Westwood One hosts their shows with Omny Studio, the Australian podcast platform company, which purports to conform to the IAB’s newest standards.

(2) The New York Times and American Public Media’s repackaging of The Daily for broadcast radio kicked off its run yesterday. Sixteen public radio stations have committed to the program, which will air after 4 p.m. ET.

Stations include KPCC in Los Angeles; WOSU in Columbus; KALW in San Francisco; KOPB in Portland, Ore.; KUOW in Seattle; and KOSU in Oklahoma City (Thunder up) — some of which, one might argue, are markets where The Daily’s reach as a podcast aren’t as strong.

You can find the full list in this press release.

(3) Last week, NPR released its latest ratings update, declaring that the organization has “maintained its highest ratings ever” — seemingly preserving the audience gains enjoyed during the particularly ear-grabbing 2016 presidential election.

In the press release touting the achievement, the public radio mothership also singled out its efforts in building podcast-to-broadcast crossovers. “Shows like Ask Me Another, TED Radio Hour, Invisibilia, and It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders were conceived as both podcasts and broadcast programs from the start,” the release wrote. That Invisibilia is mentioned here as being created with an eye towards broadcast from the start is…new to me. (Update: I was later told that this had been the plan all along, as evidenced in this press release from December 2014.)

Anyway, I dug around, and it seems NPR has only put out four press releases for ratings. Thought it might be interesting to break out two noteworthy categories:

Podcast

• From March 28, 2018: “NPR’s monthly podcast audience continues to reach new heights with 20.4 million unique users and a staggering 103.1 million global unique streams and downloads. (Source: Splunk, NPR Podcast Logs.)” This is with 42 active programs.
• From October 25, 2017: “NPR’s monthly podcast audience continues to reach new heights with 15.5 million unique users and 82 million downloads. (Source: Splunk.)” This is with 41 active programs.
• From March 15, 2017: “NPR podcasts are heard by over 4 million listeners every week — that is a 47% increase compared to a year ago.” This is with 37 active programs.
• From October 18, 2016: “In the month of September, NPR’s combined podcasts had 63 million unique downloads, nearly double its closest publisher.” The release does not mention how many podcasts were active in this period.

Total weekly listeners

• From March 28, 2018: “According to Nielsen Audio Fall 2017 ratings, the total weekly listeners for all programming on NPR stations is 37.7 million people.”
• From October 25, 2017: “According to Nielsen Audio Spring 2017 ratings, the total weekly listeners for all programming on NPR stations reached an all-time high of 37.7 million.”
• From March 15, 2017: “According to Nielsen Audio ratings, the total weekly listeners for all programming on NPR stations reached an all-time high of about 37.4 million in the fall of 2016 — a nearly 4 million person increase from the same period in 2015.”
• From October 18, 2016: “The total weekly listeners for all NPR stations are about 36.6 million.”

The “nearly 4 million person increase” noted in the March 2017 release is interesting, and it reminds me to flag this episode of Current’s The Pub podcast from October 2016, which tries to unpack the organization’s ratings jump that took place around that period. The findings apparently came down to some mix of: “network-station collaborations to improve the content and promote it better; methodological changes to how Nielsen collects ratings data; and, of course, the most bonkers election in living memory.”

Oh boy, really went down a rabbit hole on that one.

Anyway, I think the most interesting — and most accurate, I’d argue — lens to read these three developments as a trend is how it depicts efforts by broadcast-oriented companies to capitalize on gains in on-demand audio for the purposes of reinforcing core broadcast operations and business models.

Is this “one step forward, two steps back” situation, or the dialectical outcome of how the innovation narrative typically works out over the long run?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Two opportunities for newcomers:

• Spotify is doing something they’re calling the “Sound Up Bootcamp,” a weeklong all-expenses-paid intensive program targeting “aspiring female podcasters of color.” Ten applicants will be selected, and it will be held in New York City. Note: the program culminates in a pitch session, where three pitches will get to have their pilots funded up to $10,000. The workshop will be led by independent media consultants Rekha Murthy and Graham Griffith. You can find out more information here.
• The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, together with the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, is gearing up for the second cycle of its Podcast Certificate Program. NYC MOME policy analyst Anna Bessendorf writes: “The Podcast Certificate Program is deeply committed to increasing the diversity and range of voices in the industry, which has been largely homogenous. The internships that have served as both training and access points for many members of the podcasting industry simply aren’t attainable or feasible for most people, and so we’re trying to fill these gaps in access with this program.” Applications open today, deadline April 12. More info here.

On the brink. The Bright Sessions hasn’t finished its run yet, but it’s already going out on a high note. The popular fiction podcast is in the middle of its final season, having announced a few weeks ago that it would be wrapping up after 56 episodes on June 13, but the production isn’t done flexing its muscles. Recently, it celebrated its 50th episode with a special musical edition. Fun!

Anyway, here’s the pitch for the unfamiliar: The Bright Sessions is a science-fiction podcast premised on recorded therapy sessions with people in possession of supernatural abilities. Vox.com’s Tanya Pai described it as a mix of “The X-Files and the HBO psychotherapy drama In Treatment,” which is pretty spot-on, given that the show makes its meal playing around with the found footage format (much favored by fiction podcasts over the past few years), conspiracy theory territory, and interesting character work. Anyway, I enjoy it, and it’s been really interesting to watch this small, scrappy show grow over time.

The podcast is the brainchild of Lauren Shippen, a Los Angeles-based writer, voice actor, and actress. In the classic way that these things go, she created The Bright Sessions in large part as a way to give herself her own shot. “I knew I wanted to make something for me and my friends to act in and I’d had this idea of a girl who time travels when she has panic attacks,” Shippen told me when we connected over email recently.

Her decision to build the project as a podcast had a lot to do with affordable autonomy and accessibility — Shippen talked about wanting to do all the pre- and post-production herself — but also, the format suited the story she wanted to tell. “Once I started thinking of this character, I realized that putting her in therapy would be the perfect way to tell her story and also take full advantage of the audio-only format,” she said. Plus, the commitment to audio means not having much need to worry about visual effects, which comes in pretty handy for a story packed with fantastical elements.

Shippen wrote the first nine scripts in the summer of 2015, and rolled out the first episode later that November. Initially working alone, she eventually pulled together a supporting team: sound producer Mischa Stanton, composer Evan Cunningham, graphic designer Anna Lore, and consultant Elizabeth Laird (who is also Shippen’s sister). The show is pure DIY, mostly recorded in bedroom closets and the occasional studio for big group scenes.

This is a glowing mini-profile, so you can probably tell what happens from here. Ten episodes turn into twenty, episodes turn into seasons, individual narratives turn into story arcs. And by this writing, The Bright Sessions has become an achievement by no small means. The podcast just crossed over the 9 million download mark off its shoestring budget. It’s being developed for television by Dark Horse Entertainment and UCP. And it’s led Shippen to a three-book publishing deal with Tor Teen, the MacMillan imprint.

Consider it an investment that’s paid off. The podcast was largely supported throughout its run by a mix of advertising and Patreon support, with the latter carrying most of the weight through the backing of more than 1,200 patrons. “All those funds enable me to pay everyone on the team, pay for equipment and whatever else we might need,” she told me. But Shippen didn’t draw any wages for herself until this final season, mostly relying on an at-home data entry job to pay the bills.

That said, even though she’s currently accrued a bunch of new opportunities, she remains uneasy about letting her data entry job go. “While I could now drop that and write full time, I think I still have the mentality of ‘this could all go away tomorrow,’ so it seems like asking for trouble to quit an easy, flexible side gig,” she said. “But with everything I’ve got coming in the next 10 months, I think I’ll probably be moving to full-time podcaster/author by the end of the year.”

And there’s a lot coming. There’s still a good deal left for Shippen to do with The Bright Sessions. Her team is working on nine bonus episodes and two spin-offs to be released over the next three years as a result of meeting their Patreon goals. There is also the matter of the television adaptation, which she’s working with veteran TV scribe Gabrielle Stanton to produce, and her publishing deal with Tor Teen, which has her writing three Bright Sessions novels for the YA market. “I’ve just turned in the first one to my editor and I’m so excited for people to read it,” she said. “I’ve been a big YA book reader my whole life — I still read mostly YA — so this part of my career has really been a dream come true.”

But she’s also working to expand her work with audio dramas. Shippen tells me that she’s also developing a few different projects separate and apart from The Bright Sessions. No official details just yet, though she did note that she hopes to release the first in mid-2019. “I absolutely adore working in audio fiction…there’s so much flexibility and creative freedom,” Shippen said. “Regardless of what happens in my career, I can’t think of a time when I’ll want to stop making audio fiction.”

Shippen on the state of audio drama. During our email exchange, I shot off a throwaway question to get her thoughts on how far fiction podcasting has come, and where it’s going. She sent back a great, lengthy response, and I’m just going to cede the floor here because there’s a lot packed into it and I don’t want to lose an inch of context.

Voila:

Audio dramas have had such a massive boom these past few years and I really hope that continues. I think it will. Especially now that big studios like Marvel are getting involved in audio fiction, I think we’ll start to see more and more big productions with famous actors.

That’s a bit of a double-edged sword in my opinion. On the one hand, I definitely ascribe to “rising tide lifts all boats” — if big studios make good shows that pull listeners into the medium, it’s good for all of us. On the other hand, I am a little wary about people using audio fiction as a place to make proofs of concept for TV or film. I think a lot of audio dramas will make amazing TV shows — I’ll certainly be the first one to tune in to the Night Vale Presents shows and I’m really excited about what we’re developing for a Bright Session TV show — but there’s a difference of intention. I certainly never intended for The Bright Sessions to exist in other mediums and, while I’m excited about the prospect of telling the story in different formats, the podcast is the podcast and can stand all on its own. I’ve heard a little bit of chatter in LA about how podcasts can be a great place to develop IP and I don’t love that. I’d rather people get into audio fiction because they appreciate the storytelling medium for what it is. The end goal should always be making a good audio drama and if other stuff comes along with that, great. But don’t make a podcast because you want to tell that story in another medium and podcasts are just less expensive. I want big studios to get involved in the medium, but I would be sad if their proofs of concept edged out all the amazing independent producing that’s going on.

All that said, I think there’s so much to be explored in audio fiction for both independent producers and big-budget studios. The medium has definitely been dominated by sci-fi and horror for a long time and there are so many other genres that could work really well in audio. We’re starting to see that already — 36 Questions and The Fall of the House of Sunshine have both proven, in very different ways, that a musical podcast can work. Steal the Stars showed me that audio can do sex and romance just as well as any other medium; Wooden Overcoats still makes me laugh more than most of the sitcoms on TV. There’s so much swinging for the fences that’s happening and that’s paying off and I hope that will continue.

I think the biggest shift I’ve seen is the move away from the found-footage format. The Bright Sessions starts this way and some of my favorite audio dramas have this conceit. And it absolutely works. But I think the podcast audience is a lot more willing to listen to a more traditional “radio play” format that we initially gave them credit for. I think we’ll continue to see found footage stuff because when it works, it really works, but that’s been the biggest storytelling shift I’ve noticed in the industry in the past three years.

As for what I’m hoping to see…I think there’s massive opportunity to tell an immersive, multimedia story with podcasting. Some of these things already exist — the app Zombies! Run!, Panoply’s The Walk. Both of these mix a story with a degree of listener participation and I think there’s so much room for that kind of stuff going forward. A choose-your-own-adventure podcast, a mystery podcast where you have to solve something to get the next episode, a drama in the vein of the Norwegian teen show Skam that uses social media to expand its world and story — I don’t know what it’s going to be, but there’s going to be an audio drama that gets the listener involved. There are so many Gen Z-ers who love audio dramas and those kids know how to use technology and multitask to a degree that even I, at the advanced age of 26, find mind-boggling. I know I’m biased because I love making content for young people, but I definitely don’t hear a lot in the industry about teens and podcasts. There’s a big wave of audio fiction for kids, which is awesome, but students 15-22 are super into audio drama and incredibly engaged. I personally would love to make more content for young people and integrating technology into it would be a very cool challenge.

Bites.

• ICYMI: “New Trial Upheld for Adnan Syed of ‘Serial'” (The New York Times)
• Amazon and Google have filed patent applications that “outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do,” suggesting one way that the future of these smart speaker devices, which are closed ecosystems, could unfold. (The New York Times)
• Shouts to The Ezra Klein Show for getting a recorded interview with Mark Zuckerberg, but man, those host-read ad breaks are soooo uncanny valley. (Vox)
• The Atlantic adds a third show to its portfolio with the Derek Thompson-led Crazy/Genius, and brings in Katherine Wells as the publication’s first executive producer of audio. Wells was previously the executive producer of Gimlet’s Every Little Thing. (Press release)
• Starting today, The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything podcast is switching from a biweekly to a weekly publishing schedule. This comes as the publication expands its audio team after securing support from a new sponsor: Accenture. (Show page)
• Keep an eye on Spotify producing original audio shows: Last week, the streaming platform announced Déjà Vu, a new podcast in partnership with Genius. The two companies already collaborate on the former’s Behind the Lyrics feature. (Press release)

[photocredit]Photo of NPR West studio by The Mitziken Revolution under a Creative Commons license.[/photocredit]