There’s been a lot of buzz in the podcasting and audio world about the recent rapid growth of smart speakers, and the opportunities they might hold for increased podcast audience. Edison Research’s The Podcast Consumer 2018 report, released yesterday, showed just how quick this growth has been:
Among the US population, smart speaker ownership has gone from 7% to 18% — a 2.5x growth. But among monthly podcast consumers, it’s gone from 11% to 30% — almost 3x, and now 3 in 10 podcast listeners. This is a big deal.
Just how big a deal, though? Looking at just how smart speakers are utilized among those who own them, we see the following breakdown:
Just 17% of smart speaker owners use them to listen to podcasts — which is less than the 26% of the US population that listens to podcasts every month. What about among those smart speaker owners who are also monthly podcast listeners?
It’s a greater share — 24% — but that still underperforms the general-population. To make it clear: podcast listeners who own smart speakers are slightly less likely to listen to podcasts on them, than a random member of the public is to listen to podcasts, at all.
Moreover, those podcast listeners listen to AM/FM news/talk radio far more often (38%) and far more often than smart speaker owners generally (32%). What can we deduce from this?
At first, this seems like a big missed opportunity for podcast producers. Even their own listeners aren’t listening to podcasts on this new audio platform. But let’s think this through a bit more. Given that that’s the current status quo, what would it cost to change that situation?
- Invest developer resources in building a “skill” for Amazon, an app for Google, and making it work with existing workflows. Maybe you have a lot of extra developer hours sitting idle — but maybe not. If not, this means you’re investing in this work to the exclusion of other work- on your own website, or audio player, or app.
- Promote listenership through the smart speakers: this can be via house ads on your existing podcasts, social media call-outs, e-mail blasts, or other channels. But this will either take the place of existing inventory (in the case of house ads), or risk overloading the audience in social or email. Again, there’s a cost.
In either of the above cases, there are several levels of cost. First, there’s the opportunity cost: what are you not doing, because you’re investing resources in promoting listenership on smart speakers? This includes not just developer time but also the hours of meetings and strategy, often involving senior management, to figure out this strategy.
Second, there’s the question of who is benefiting. You might be reaching your audience — or other audiences (this is debatable at present, as discovery is if anything more difficult on smart speakers than in podcast apps) — and you might get to serve them the same ads. However, Amazon notes that:
We reserve the right to reject or suspend any skill that includes advertising or promotional messaging we determine is misleading or confusing, results in a poor customer experience, or is otherwise inappropriate.
Fairly standard for a platform company — but not for podcasts. Apple doesn’t do that (yet); do you really want to inject a potential 3rd-party veto to your advertising content? And of course — Amazon reserves the right to change those terms whenever they please.
Finally: think about publishers’ experience with Facebook over the past years. They’ve followed each change in the algorithm — curiosity gap! pivot to video! — and been left holding the bag each time, as Facebook blithely changes policy 9 or 12 or 18 months down the road. If you believe that this time will be different: best of luck. But if you think podcasts can learn from the hard-won experience of other digital publishers over the past decade-plus, this is a moment to pause and consider.
Do you want to devote your limited organizational resources to promoting the movement of your audience further away from you, onto a 3rd-party platform that already feels empowered to include (boilerplate! but still) language about disapproving ads and content if it doesn’t meet their standards (whatever those are)?
Perhaps. Maybe this is just audience service; maybe there’s some new content you don’t mind putting out there, and seeing what happens. There is a first-mover advantage on any new platform, and if you have a brand that you can be sure your audience will be looking for on a new platform, getting there to serve them can be a good move.
There’s also the Apple not-quite-monopoly to consider. The Apple Podcasts rankings remain both opaque in their calculation, and tough to crack. There are some publishers that have found smart speakers a better way to debut and build audience than through the standard RSS path.
But before you act, think through the costs and benefits, the real trade-offs, of devoting your own organizational resources to the promotion of a 3rd-party platform far larger and more powerful than yours. Not for nothing, but this might also be a good time to step back and think about how much of your organizational capacity is going to promote another 3rd-party platform — Apple Podcasts — that has been normalized in the world of podcasts. If you’re thinking about the trade-offs to audience development through platforms, that should be part of the equation, too.
