Podcasts Expand Drastically

0:00All right. So we are going to talk about how podcasts are continuing to expand drastically. So Neil, if you were to guess, how many listeners in the United States how many people do you think are listening to podcast. per week? I would say 100 million-ish people. Wow. Where'd you pull that number from? I made it up. If you look at the US population, percentage of them are really young, percentage of them are really old, probably 100-ish million people. So Neil is right. So podcasting is back. So according to Edison Research, highest numbers ever with 90 million listeners per week. I was close.

0:34Yeah, you're right. I said you're spot on. So another study by iHeartMedia suggests that expansion has chipped away time spent on streaming and social media. And with an upward of 3 million podcasts on offer, more people are listening to more content than at any time since the heyday of radios. The power players, okay, this is an article on the power players in the podcasting space. Funny enough, we dealt with one of them before. But what are our thoughts on this? And just so everyone knows, Edison Research, they have a really good study that they do each year on podcasting. Maybe we'll review that later.

1:03Podcasting is booming. And if you look at the United States, we're actually quite a bit behind in some other countries, Like in China, podcasting has really boomed. In the United States, I don't think we've hit our inflection point. And if you actually look at how many podcasts there are, there's not that many. I know people are like, oh yeah, there's less than 10 million podcasts. But if you actually look at how many active podcasts there are, where people are still producing episodes or produce more than 50 episodes, the number really starts shrinking fast. It's a wide open space right now. I'm just looking at some of these creators in here.

1:31So Emma Chamberlain, YouTube channel with 12 million subs, and she signed a multi-year deal with Spotify for expansion. And then Stuff, you should know. So how Stuff works, they sold for about$55 million to iHeart in 2018 or so. And then Joe Rogan, everyone knows that he did his$100 million plus deal. And then the other thing I'll mention is, I think his name is Bill Simmons. So Simmons, Spotify forked over$250 million to acquire the ringer. And now Bill Simmons is the head of podcast innovation and monetization at Spotify. So he's an employee there. And so there's another lesson here. If you don't have the attention, you can go buy the attention, but also have the attention working for you.

2:08That's kind of what's happening right now. Dude, it's so funny. When you guys said Bill Simmons, I'm like, that name sounds super familiar. I Googled him and I'm like, oh yeah. I'm like, no wonder he has such a big deal. And Ben Shapiro too. So Ben Shapiro, he has about 6.1 million YouTube subs and he has a bunch of people to listen. Kara Swisher. I can keep dropping names here. The fact of the matter is like, we see more podcast studios forming around LA, which is where I am and Neil's about to be at some point, but hopefully. And more and more people are doing podcasts. You can see even on Instagram.

2:39So you can see the signals, like the leading indicators of more and more people are doing podcasts, more studios are opening, and it's just going to become more and more of a thing. And so I think now is still a good time. There's only 3 million podcasts at play right now versus like billions of blogs, right? So I think it's good timing. I would not recommend, I think if you need the money, go ahead and sell it. I don't think Neil and I would sell this podcast. I think we're just going to keep going and compounding for a very long time. I didn't know that there was money and selling your podcast.

3:05Unless you gave me like, if you gave us each$50 million or a hundred million, maybe we'd do it. So there's the price for you all. Look, at the end of the day, if you are trying to build an audience, one of the best places to do so is podcasting. And I would go from there. If you don't do podcasting, I think you're missing out on a big untapped market. This one last wrinkle, right? If I were to start from scratch, personally, my opinion here, and Neil might disagree, but I would start with podcasting today and then have a good video for it. And I would put the longs on YouTube. And then I would also have a clips channel for five to 10 minute clips.

3:41And I would also have the shorts as well for the longer channel. And that's just gonna be a way to get more discoverability for my podcast. Keep in mind though, even though Neil and I are saying start a podcast, obviously we think you should start with experience first too. If you don't have any experience, you're not gonna be able to ask good questions. Or let's say if you start a business podcast, you're gonna interview like billionaires and things like that. You better have good questions because that directly affects the quality of your content. So whether it's gaining experience or doing your research, you have to still put in the work.

4:07It doesn't mean like, oh, just because we're saying start a podcast or start a blog or whatever, it doesn't mean you can just do whatever. It's got to be better than the vast majority of other people. And if you don't go out there and you don't want to end up creating one, that's fine. Advertise on other people or be a guest on a lot of them and you can still get the juice from podcasting. All right. Goodbye. That's it. Five stars.