In a recent audience study conducted by Sounds Profitable, a key finding reveals that most podcast listeners would follow podcast creators across formats. The finding is perhaps more surprising than it seems, because it’s not necessarily easy to move audiences across boundaries that separate video from social media, clips from newsletters, and so on. The research found that 73% of podcast listeners would follow a creator from audio to video, which is perhaps the widest moat to cross. Also: Seventy-one percent sould follow creators from long-form content (like an entire podcast) to clips.
Sounds Profitable concludes: “Audience looyalty is tied more closely to creators than to any single platform or format. Audiences don’t think in terms of platforms, they follow creators.”
There’s more; the research found that different mediums serve discrete functions for listeners. Audio is the “trust engine,” while video provides the ecosystem’s engagement and activation layer. Sounds Profitable suggests that creators and advertisers, both groups, would benefit by thinking of podcasting “not as a standalone medium but as part of a broader creator ecosystem.”