As we mentioned earlier this week, podcast consultancy and content company Sounds Profitable has released The Creators: Understanding the Modern Podcast Creator Landscape.
The 35-page (plus appendices) presentation slide package covers three broad topics:
- Format evolution
- Creator diversity
- Sustainability challenges
The study was fielded by Signal Hill Insights, and queried over 5,000 Americans 18 years and older. Sounds Profitable commissioned an earlier, similar study in 2022.
Making podcasts is mainstream
The definition of “mainstream” is slippery, but a quick look-up delivers “normal, conventional, or dominant.” Not easy to quantify, but “mainstream” certainly shouldn’t be confused with “majority.” The Sounds Profitable study has determined that 16% of the population have tried their hands (and voices) at creating podcasts, so that “mainstream” has been achieved.
As a corollary to that, we learn that 71% of creators now include video in their show releases.
Starting is the easy part, of course, and Sounds Profitable offers a fallibility metric: one in three creators have stopped creating.
More About Creators
Considerable research effort is devoted to knowing podcast creator characteristics. Here are some quick results:
15% of male podcast consumers are currently creating podcasts; eight percent of female.
Female creators adopt multi-format approached at significantly higher rates than males.
52% of all video podcasters are age 18-34. (Flip side: 48% are older)
96% of Asian podcasters include video, by far the highest ethnographic percentage. Sixty-six percent of white podcast creators use video.
Scale of Abandonment
Sounds like a movie title. It’s a series of measurements showing metrics of lapsed production, all in the context of podcast consumers trying to be podcasters. That double layer is represented in the graphic below.
Nearly 30 more slides were released by Sounds Profitable, covering Churn rates, retention rates, “lapsed” creators, how engagement relates to sustainability in different demographics, an interesting “format mismatch hypothesis,” how lapsed creators consume audio, several slides explaining what the data teaches us, questions for further research.
Three key findings are packed into the final slide in this high-octane data parade:
