The US podcasting market: The new frontier

Over the last three years, podcasts have been increasingly highlighted as one of the new hot trends in the Media & Entertainment landscape. In the US, the success of some widely adopted podcasts - The Joe Rogan Experience on top of them, launched in 2009 and now generating more than 190 million downloads per month - paved the way for a multitude of actors, from the biggest media companies to the anonymous individuals. In Europe, the podcast hype started more recently with a growing number of traditional actors and pure players launching their own platforms since 2019. The podcast audience in the US has been growing fast. In five years, the penetration rate of regular podcast listeners almost doubled in the country, reaching 41% of the population at the end of 2020. In the meantime, the podcasting market generated almost $800 million in advertising revenues last year.   Historically, the US podcasting market has been supplied with a strong content offer from traditional publishers: regional and national radio networks such as iHeart, NPR or Audacy (Entercom Radio); from print publishers such as The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal; and from giant horizontal media companies - AT&T through its WarnerMedia and Turner divisions on top of them -, who have started to invest massively in podcasting over the past three years. If this trend is not brand new - after all, the US has been historically the native land of podcasting, Apple invented the term at the beginning of the 2000’s -, a significant shift occurred in 2018. Prior to that year, the US podcasting ad market was already significant, but mainly led by traditional actors capitalizing on the situational annuity granted by the digitalization of their linear radio content, with little investment made in native podcasts. Some independent actors already generated substantial ad revenues, such as Earwolf Podcast Network, PodcastOne, but the premium content offer remained scarce. From 2018 however, the podcast offer has started to increase dramatically: Spotify accelerated its podcast acquisition strategy, more than tripling the number of podcasts available on its platform each year between 2018 and 2020. At the end of last year, the Swedish streaming giant had more than 2.2 million podcasts available. This acceleration quickly translated into financial results: Spotify generated almost eight times more revenue from podcasts in 2020 than in 2018, reaching $60 million last year. The same comparison can be made with the major US publishers: the iHeartRadio podcast network almost quintupled its podcast revenues over the same period, Pandora - owned by SiriusXM - also quintupled its revenues, and The New York Times tripled its revenues. This trend paved the way for a growing number of services...