Podcast success means that radio is not dead; it’s resurgent


Suddenly our grandparents’ mass medium is cool again. In a twist of fate, radio is killing the video stars.

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I’m a member of an amateur detective’s club, I’m happy to tell you without a hint of shame. My sleuthing career began last fall when I fired up a smartphone app and listened to a weekly instalment of the now famous Serial podcast. The 12-episode series investigated the case of Adnan Syed, a Baltimore teen who may have been wrongfully convicted of killing his high-school girlfriend in 1999.

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By the time Serial’s season ended in December, I had more than 5 million cronies, led by Reddit’s dedicated league of junior detectives, who were chatting up the case all over the Internet. The show is over, but the investigators live on. We’re still discussing new revelations in other media and the possibility the #FreeAdnan team may find a legal manoeuvre to spring him. You can find the podcast in iTunes, where it’s still No. 1 and available for binge listening.

The success of Serial is the most spectacular evidence of the return of radio, a trend that has been growing for the last few years. Suddenly our grandparents’ mass medium is cool again. In a twist of fate (and with apologies to the Buggles) radio is killing the video stars. Or at least giving them some serious competition.

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That’s because radio is the virtuous medium. Unlike TV, which is a time-suck that leaves you feeling vaguely ashamed after a binge, radio is enjoyed while being productive. Cooking, doing laundry, walking the dog, exercising, and painting your toenails are all enhanced with smart chat.

Jad Abumrad, host of the sophisticated Radiolab podcast, says radio also creates empathy because it involves the listener in an intimate relationship with the host. The two have to work together to overcome the lack of pictures. “In a sense I may be painting pictures (with a description) but I am not holding the paint brush; you are,” Abumrad says in a Big Think video. “It’s a deep act of co-authorship.” And that, he believes, keeps listeners loyal.

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But since the arrival of podcasts a decade ago, devoted audio fans aren’t just listening; they’re flocking to live touring shows of public radio hits like This America Life (the show that spawned Serial) and eccentric indie podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale. The latter is an iTunes chart topper about a fictional community radio station in an eerie desert town that has apparently been invaded by aliens. Think Roswell, with a slyly comic narrator.

We can thank smartphones and their apps for the radio renaissance, since podcasts can be had with the touch of a button anywhere there’s WiFi. And soon, that will be everywhere. Cars, public transit, and other public spaces are all in the process of becoming hotspots, which means 2014’s radio boom is poised to be an explosion.

But easy Internet access isn’t the only reason commercial podcasting networks are springing up. The other is that podcasting’s small-but-passionate audiences are an advertiser’s dream. Marketers can reach finely targeted demographic groups via a medium that can hold that niche audience enthralled.

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Podcasts specialize in seducing listeners with marketing messages delivered by the host in a folksy, old-fashioned style. The friendly endorsements are better than the usual sort of ads audiences only tolerate. They can even be crucial to the entertainment. That’s the case with Serial’s Mailchimp ad that spawned the MailKimp Girl. That meme came about when Serial aired an ad featuring a quirky parade of ordinary people saying the company’s name, including a child who stumbles and pronounces it “mail-kimp.” Audiences were charmed. Now there’s a mailkimp hashtag and Serial fans are begging the company to produce a MailKimp T-shirt.

Not bad for the sort of sponsorship ad that can cost as little as $10 to $30 per thousand listeners. According to StartUp, a new podcast about starting a podcasting business, Mailchimp paid $6,000 an episode for a spot heard by upwards of 120,000 listeners in its first week. And since podcasts like this are evergreen, the audience grows as long as a podcast is hanging around iTunes’ Top 100.

Podcasting also has something increasingly hard to find in other media: an ardent, engaged audience willing to pay for content. Because the hosts are whispering in our ears, there’s an intimacy to podcasting that also breeds loyalty. Listeners aren’t just willing to pay for subscriptions; they’re volunteering cash for something they can get for free. Serial just crowd-funded a Season 2 in addition to selling Season 1 to BBC radio.

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Canadaland is another crowdfunding success. Producer Jesse Brown, who broke the Jian Ghomeshi story with the Toronto Star, asked his 10,000 fans to donate a few bucks a month to cover the costs of his media criticism podcast. The crowd funded him to the tune of $7,800 a month.

Alex Blumberg, another alumnus of This American Life, is leading the charge into what he believes is radio’s future: for-profit commercial podcasting. Or, to hear him tell it, he’s bumbling and stumbling his way into that future. And you can hear him tell it on his podcast, StartUp, which documents his progress launching Gimlet Media. This includes his encounters with venture capitalists and business-naming specialists as well as his exchanges with his long-suffering wife. Hard not to feel for her, since they have two young children and Blumberg gave up one of the plum jobs in journalism: a staff reporting gig at NPR that came with a health plan.

But that, of course, is the secret of podcasting. In his personal, emotional style of narrative journalism, Blumberg regales us with confessional tales until he begins to feel like a friend. Soon we’re hooked, tuning in to hear whether this will be the week his harebrained scheme blows up. So Blumberg caught us all off-guard when he reported that, despite wearing tennis shoes to business meetings, he had raised $1.5 million for his venture. That included $200,000 through a crowdfunding campaign that hit its goal within hours.

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In interviews about his fledgling empire, Blumberg says that he is hoping his company will become “the HBO of podcasting.” While there are more than 250,000 podcasts, and a rapidly growing audience for them, most of the amateur offerings are unlistenable. So a number of radio professionals, as well as actors and comedians, have been rushing in to fill the gap.

Blumberg admits that, with a quarter of a million competitors, his plan to get rich producing commercial podcasts might seem a touch naive. “But I think that what people want is something closer to Game of Thrones,” he told the New York Times.

Judging by the success of Serial, he’s probably right. It’s addictive because it’s a beautifully crafted result of more than a year’s research by a journalist who still knows how to do old-fashioned reporting. And in an era of bloggers drinking each other’s bathwater, that kind of engaging journalism isn’t just rare, it’s rare enough to be worth paying for.

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