How do you listen to your podcasts? For me, the practice always involves multitasking. I combine listening with a physical activity that I don’t need to think about, but that still engages a sliver of my mind. I listen while cleaning the kitchen or folding clothes. Or, I listen on the subway while playing Two Dots on my phone. Don’t judge. Two Dots is the trick I deploy to distract my wandering mind and focus. I’m on level 578, which should tell you something about how many hours of audio I’ve consumed personally.
The thing is, I *can’t* just listen. My mind always wanders. No matter what.
And, it turns out other people seem to have this issue, too. Eighty percent of listeners multitask, according to Michael Wolf’s annual technology and media outlook, which dropped yesterday.
In the case of podcasting, unlike watching TV or surfing the web, multitasking doesn’t involve dividing attention between other forms of media—watching TV, surfing the web. Most people are doing something else rather than thinking about something else. They’re commuting. Or, they’re exercising. I’d venture to guess this approach to listening actually supports a deeper concentration on the material, which is part of what makes podcasting so unique.
I always look forward to Michael’s slide show as a window into a possible future for the media industry. Invariably, embedded in the nearly 200 slides are a few data points that help shape my thinking. Herewith, a few takeaways:
💡The average US household will spend $298 this year on books and digital subscriptions. That’s about 10% of what we spend on media in a year. We’ll spend $1,044 on video, which is just more than a third of our media spend.
💡People are discovering podcasts rapidly. In the next five years, the estimated number of podcast listeners will nearly double to 164 million from an estimated 88 million listeners this year.
💡There are SO MANY podcasts! In 2015, there were 60,000 podcasts available on iTunes. Currently, there are 750,000 podcasts available.
💡The top podcast remains The Daily, published by the New York Times. This American Life ranks in at #3. Planet Money is #8. Most of the top shows are produced by legacy media companies.
💡Rather than downloading our podcasts, we’ll stream them more and more often. Among other things, this should allow us to understand more about how people are listening to shows.
💡Apple dominates in sheer numbers of hours that people are spending listening to podcasts. But other listening services are increasingly popular among listeners. Spotify has almost the same number of people searching for shows, though they aren’t listening for as long.
💡Wolf’s team predicts that ads will continue to be the primary way podcasts make money because, hey, hosts telling you to buy things isn’t awful and in fact, a lot of listeners appear to find it entertaining. They expect that by 2023, total ad revenue for podcasts will be $1.6 billion, or four times the 2018 ad revenue of $400 million.
🎙Things I’ve made: For Hello Monday, I hosted Nom Wah Tea Parlor’s Wilson Tang:
Then last week, Laura Linney joined me:
🛋Things I’ve read:
Mina Kimes on the Incredible Survival Story of DeAndre Hopkins and his Mom in ESPN.
The media trends that led to President Trump's 2016 victory are growing stronger leading up to 2020.
This writer alleges Instagram disproportionately discriminates against fat bodies.
LinkedIn now has a newsroom of 65 journalists. As one of them, I’m quoted in this article, which unpacks our strategy.
🏆This week in WeWork:
Softbank bails out the company, which is now valued at a paltry $8 billion,** and owns 80% of it. Softbank fixer Marcelo Claure has stepped into the CEO role. A Softbank exec and ‘16 Crown Fellow, Marcelo’s a soccer fan who co-founded One Laptop Per Child with Nicholas Negroponte.
I’ve heard of at least two offers for books about the company and one documentary already in production. Meanwhile, the former CEO has even left the board, but has netted around as much as $1.7 billion all in. What’s the lesson here exactly? Sell big or go home…
**PSA: valuations of private technology companies are part boasting, part bullshit, and even at their best, are generally tied to a completely unpredictable future. They indicate promise, of an idea and of and industry. And that promise, for WeWork, and more broadly, has lately been called into question.
Things I’ve heard:
🎉Kudos!
Daphne Kwon, most recently at Betaworks, has joined Meredith as chief strategy officer.
Former Nest CTO and Google VP Yoky Matsuoka is launching a new company for Panasonic. I wrote about Yoky for Wired in 2015; she’s an exceptional roboticist and a genius, officially, as designated by MacArthur.
***So maybe you’re asking, what’s this about again? You're my brain trust. I don't write for thousands. I write to exchange ideas with the small group of people I've met and who matter to me, in hopes that together we can figure out something more about where the world is going and how it gets there. This is a team sport