The growth of podcasts and their audience over the last few years, especially the previous year odd, has its roots in a unique phenomenon taking over the world of content. It’s built on what can be called “Passive content consumption”. Unlike video and written content which expect total focus from our senses, audio content enables us to consume content while allowing us the flexibility of doing other things while we consume it. This very aspect has led many to choose podcasts+ social audio content over more visual forms. And in doing so have enabled this new content ecosystem to hit a growth trajectory that isn’t just helping the content scale but enabling a whole industry of businesses and careers to bloom.
Let’s start with the podcasters themselves. People enabled by the readily available tools online and on their phones/other devices to create content with an almost minimal cost of entry. While for a large part of this creator class, traditional monetisation like ads, sponsors, etc. are still some time away from its allowing them to use podcasts as a platform to build a captive audience, grow a personal/business brand and also show capabilities that they’re able to monetise in indirect ways. With most venture capital and finance firms now with podcasts to drill down their methodologies & with business leaders across the board kicking off their podcaster journeys, the ripple effects of how people gravitate towards businesses and personalities whose podcasts they listen to is now an established fact.
Many podcasters are also skilled technicians to mix/master & take on all forms of creation work for a podcast. In offering this as a service to other creators in the ecosystem, they’re opening up a constant recurring revenue model for themselves. And this isn’t just technical personnel; its producers with creative and logistical understanding, communications specialists with marketing know-how and business professionals with the ability to crack deals with platforms and brands. These are fast scaling into an entire industry of jobs that are only going to increase in demand.
And let’s not forget the platforms focussed on building the technology and tools that allow this democratisation of creation in the first place. Technology is solving all ends of the spectrum for creators, from distribution platforms to tech-enabled creation toolkits and programmatic ad platforms.
This is a bonafide industry now, with the only prerequisite to create is an Idea and a voice, and the basic foundation to work in it is having a consumers ear. The rest is just a simple google search away.
Article is authored by Varun Duggirala – content creator, podcaster, entrepreneur, and personal development pundit.
