Hey, everyone. The good news is there’s something to distract us from the endless pandemic. The bad news is that the distraction is World War III.
The Plain View
Stephen Dubner’s podcast began as a stealth pilot for a radio show. It was 2010, and he had coauthored the breakout book Freakonomics—five years after its publication, it had sold more than 4 million copies. He loved public radio and thought it a perfect medium for his subject matter. Instead of taking endless meetings to brainstorm the project, he started a podcast as a proof of concept. It won him a public radio deal, but the podcast kept going as part of the arrangement. (Though Dubner is still friendly with coauthor Steven Levitt, the podcast is his alone.)
By mid-decade, however, he came to realize the central engine driving his mix of economics, statistics, and pop culture was the podcast, not the radio exposure. “I was just shocked that it was popular because I didn't understand that podcasting was really starting to happen,” he says. He now understands it very well: Podcasting has fully made the jump from a grassroots phenomenon to an established medium controlled by giant corporations. And his own story is kind of a mini-history of how that came to be.
If this were an episode of the narrative-style Freakonomics podcast, Dubner might now say something like, “Let’s take a look at how all this started” and flash back to the very beginnings of podcasting, when people like blogging pioneer Dave Winer and former MTV VJ Adam Curry first began posting audio for download. Another voice that might pop up is that of entrepreneur Evan Williams. In the mid-2000s, Williams formed a company called Odeo that he hoped would do for podcasting what his previous company, Blogger, had done for blogging. In 2005, I visited the Odeo offices in the South of Market district of San Francisco. (This was before I worked for Williams at Medium nine years later. I still hold the illiquid shares I earned there.) “I think it’ll be at least as big as blogs are now,” he told me then. “It’s a great medium for personal expression.” But after Apple integrated podcast distribution in iTunes that year—hijacking Odeo’s plans—Williams pivoted the company to embrace an idea that came from one of his engineers, called Twitter.
Apple’s embrace of podcasting was only one milestone in the medium’s steady growth. By the time Dubner set up his mic in 2010, there were hundreds of thousands of podcasts. But even then, the traditional media power law was in effect, whereby a small percentage of properties got the lion’s share of downloads. Freakonomics became part of that elite, a perennial in the top 50, and Dubner came to realize that a top podcast is almost an annuity. Most people sign up for a few favorite podcasts that arrive in their listening app automatically. When you have a loyal audience, they stay with you. Freakonomics Radio has about 2.5 million unique listeners, who download more than 10 million episodes a month. Advertisers get their money’s worth.
But since there are only so many hours in a day, new podcasts struggle to break through. If you are launching a new podcast, your best bet is to partner with (or be produced by) one of the hit shows, which might not only promote you, but send your first episode to its subscriber base. Just this month, for instance, the new season of Serial enjoyed a head start when the first installment ran as an episode of This American Life, a top-10 podcast.
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Freakonomics provides Dubner a good living and creative freedom. “The single biggest advantage of this medium is that I can do pretty much exactly what I want to do,” he says. “And our audience really belongs to us, not some platform or publication.” Eat your heart out, Joe Rogan.
Still, Freakonomics has had to navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem. Dubner moved the Freakonomics podcast from WNYC to a platform named Stitcher in 2018. Stitcher, which distributed a vast collection of podcasts, took care of the ads, and Dubner’s podcast was still available on other platforms. But in 2021, Stitcher’s owner, the Scripps publishing company, sold the platform to a giant media company, SiriusXM, which makes most of its money from paid subscriptions.
It was part of a great consolidation. For the past few years, upstart podcasting operations have been methodically snapped up, at monster valuations, by established companies that have finally been awakened to the promise of this not-so-new audio medium. Spotify, with its $100 million investment in The Joe Rogan Experience (or maybe $200 million?) is a case in point. In February 2020, Spotify dropped another $200 million for The Ringer, with its Bill Simmons podcasts, and just last week it bought two more podcasting companies. Spotify’s MO is to distribute its podcasts only on its own service. But an even scarier acquirer is Amazon. Last April, it paid $300 million for the Wondery podcast company. These companies see podcasts not as a way of making money by selling ads, but as ways to serve their larger business models. For Spotify, they provide better subscriptions margins than music because podcasts don’t require huge payouts to record labels. And Amazon sees podcasts as a way to augment its multimedia content holdings—Wondery’s narrative presentations are perfect source material for the TV series and films on Amazon Prime.
There’s also a sleeping giant in the podcast field: YouTube. Google has its own podcasting platform, but shows are increasingly appearing on its video service. “It’s the dark matter of podcast listening,” says Erik Diehn, the former CEO of Stitcher who now advises Freakonomics Radio.
Some companies are still holding out, notably WaitWhat, whose hit podcasts include Masters of Scale and Meditative Story. “We are increasingly unique in the landscape as an independent,” says CEO June Cohen. “Our strategy is to cross-play across platforms—even before we launched the Masters of Scale podcast, we knew we’d adapt it as a book, and an app, and a curriculum, and an event.” Which makes her company even more attractive to buyers. “It’s a moment for premium content,” she admits. (Speaking of premium content, WIRED does podcasting, too!)
Will podcasting become like streaming, where you have to subscribe to several services to hear all your favorites? Williams, the entrepreneur who bailed early, thinks that may be the case, at least for the more lavishly produced podcasts. “The bundled subscription is a very powerful model at scale, so it makes sense that it will fund the acquisition, exclusive licensing, and creation of podcasts—as it does streaming video.” And that’s not a bad thing, he says. “If it works, it’s getting podcast creators serious money and raising the bar for the genre, which ultimately benefits consumers. Yes, they will have to pay, but that’s fair for endless hours or entertainment and knowledge, is it not?”
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For now, Stephen Dubner has it both ways—he’s associated with SiriusXM but also has his shows distributed on multiple platforms. That’s shows, plural—he’s created a Freakonomics family of four, including one by coauthor Steven Levitt. Next month, those four shows (and more to come) will form the core of a new channel on SiriusXM, the company’s first devoted to continuously streaming podcasts. As a writer who values reach, Dubner loves that his podcast audiences will still be able to listen for free, in exchange for enduring the ads sprinkled throughout the presentation.
Later? Maybe, maybe not. “If I had to bet, three to five years from now, podcasting will probably be a bunch of gated communities,” he says, adding that there may well be easements and side deals, like exclusive windows before a podcast is released to the general public.
Oh well. There’s always public radio.
Time Travel
I wrote about podcasting in The Perfect Thing, my 2006 book about the iPod and its impact.
The version of iTunes that included podcasting came out on June 28, 2005. By the first of July, users had downloaded a million podcasts. “We really do see this as the next generation of radio,” Apple’s Greg Joswiak gushed to me. “That said, a million podcasts in two days really staggered us.” Professional tech prognosticators were bullish on podcasts: A Diffusion Group “digiswami” proclaimed that by 2010, 57 million people would be downloading podcasts. (A Forrester Research analyst weighed in with a more modest estimate of 30 million.)
The progress of podcasts followed the earlier evolutionary path of websites from fringe to mainstream, this time at a rate so accelerated that it was almost a blur. One day the most popular podcasts were quirky homegrown productions like “Dawn and Drew” by a wacky postpunk married couple living in a Wisconsin farmhouse, and “Madge Goldberg,” a broadly performed transvestite parody of a home show. On what seemed like the very next day, people were downloading podcasts from the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Major League Baseball. It was almost as if every media outlet had to have a podcast. Right away. But more important, it also seemed as though everyone wanted to be a media outlet—and could be, too.
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In 2021, an estimated 82 million people in the US downloaded podcasts, a number expected to rise to 100 million by 2024.
Ask Me One Thing
Gabe asks, “Why does diversity in tech still neglect to include the ageism issue?”
Thanks for asking, Gabe. Clearly you recall my 2015 project for Backchannel where I crowdsourced responses and suggestions for how people could fight ageism in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere). But as you imply, the issue still isn’t settled. Though it’s been encouraging to see increased consciousness in making the workplace more diverse, discrimination on the basis of age still happens. I support training on unconscious bias, but in programs I’ve seen, very little seems to be devoted to bias against people of a certain age. They (we) deserve to be seen as equally energetic, ambitious, and creative as the pups they work with. One thing working against older folks is raw economics—it’s cheaper to hire people at the beginning of their careers than more experienced workers with résumés that demand higher compensation. But a lot of it, as Aston Applewhite discusses at length, is just ignorance and discomfort about age itself. Silicon Valley—and even the media world—can do more to address it.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Gotham enjoys a 68-degree day in February—right before a snowstorm.
Last but Not Least
A rare look at the lab where Intel tries to hack its own chips.
A fascinating profile of Jacques Vallée, the model for the Truffaut character in Close Encounters. Plus, he looks amazing at 82!
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Regulating AI is a tricky endeavor. But surely China will do it well!
Get ’em before they’re locked up—here are WIRED’s choices for best podcasts.
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