Podcasts: Why you should build a habit of listening to it

People may think that the attention span of the audiences is getting smaller and smaller. Social media sites are now focusing on 10 to 15 seconds reels and incentivising people to deliver their content in a much shorter form.

But there is a unique medium that even makes the idea of radio even seem like short form communication, and that is podcasts. Podcasts are long form audio or video discussion generally ranging from an hour to two or three. In this age of short attention spans it is shocking how many people are an active and consistent audience of these long form podcasts. As proven by the audience numbers of the top podcasts of the world. For example the ranked number one podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, exclusively streamed on spotify regularly has about 10 million views per episode. And the average time per episode is close to 2 hours 30 minutes.

The audience has created a demand for long form podcast mainly due to the lack of nuanced entertainment, as shown in The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe has on guests circumventing a wide range of industries, from philosophers to MMA fighters and uninterrupted and ad free medium of deep conversation has taken over the spot of radio. One can call it internet radio and it wouldn’t be unfair. The media industry underestimates the people and what they have the capacity to consume. Listening to a professor explain quantum physics for two hours is unimaginable as a TV show but is a basic episode of the top podcasts of the world and they have the viewers to prove the demand of the people.

News companies are also facing the challenges to cope up with the podcasting world as independent journalism is promoted highly as journalists now have the opportunity to go down a deep dive into complex topics that are rarely discussed in mainstream news or maybe discussed in a ten minute segment that can’t possibly inform the people properly.

Companies such as spotify, substack, patreon are now making deals with independent podcasters to make them exclusive to their own platform. Spotify made a deal with The Joe Rogan Experience for over 200 million dollars according to ‘The New York Times’ to have the show exclusively streamed. And more and more platforms are moving in this direction as they see the loyal audience capture opportunity.

The term “podcasting” actually came out of the Ipod, as Apple first introduced the opportunity to spread the message through the Ipod to other users and thus the Podcasting term got stuck. But Apple is not the leading company for podcasters. It is patreon as even a paid subscription model of podcasting is proving to be profitable and this makes the industry as a whole more sustainable also.