Right now it is estimated to 800,000 active podcasts available online with 30 million episodes recorded in 100 different languages.
According to Populus Research in March 2019, ‘Entertainment’ is the most listened to genres each week with 57% of the listens while ‘Comedy’, ‘Talk Shows’, ‘Current Affairs’ and ‘Sport’ make up the top five genres.
Journalist, Ben Hammersley, the man credited with coming up with the name ‘podcasts’, told the BBC last year it was true-crime podcast, Serial that changed the podcast landscape for advertisers.
“The cultural breakthrough came in 2014 with a very specific podcast – Serial, a piece of investigative journalism hosted by Sarah Koenig, narrating a non-fiction story over multiple episodes. To date, the first and second seasons of the show have had more than 340 million downloads
“Serial changed everything. By the time it got into series two, the advertising space sold out in a day for sums that went into the millions,” he explained to the BBC.
Research details by Music Oomph reported that regular podcast listeners are more likely to subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime, meaning they are less likely to be exposed to traditional TV advertising.
This research goes further to show the importance of podcast advertising to brands and it’s a sector which is going dramatically.
WARC’s 2019 Global Ad Tends Report found that podcast advertising spend is currently worth $855m globally with that figure set to rise to $1.6bn by 2022.
The report also discovered that 78% of listeners do not mind advertising in podcasts if it leads to the content remaining free of charge to the user.
