In 1981 the inaugural MTV music video was Video Killed the Radio Star; Today social media videos are similarly changing podcast economics
Then and now, it was about media economics. History has shown us how radio, a favorite medium of mine since I was a kid in a remote rural town, lost much of its ad dominance to television, and then further to cable TV.
Then came podcasts. To me they were a revelation! They were radio, but with topics scaled across what felt like an infinitely long tail — far more variety and specificity than broadcast or cable bandwidths could ever deliver.
And, Bonus! They were on demand, so I could listen on my terms!
Back in its infancy, podcasting was like a specific type of audio: college radio. In that there was zero money in it.
I mused on this very site, 20 years ago, how podcasts might change that. I even predicted in Monetizing podcasts that we could have ad buys and sponsorships as the drivers of its business model. Of course what I couldn’t predict back in 2006 was socially-distributed videos and clips — which have knocked out of our ears the voices of, to name three, Dana Stevens, Stephen Metcalf, and Mike Pesca.
Below you’ll learn from Mike why his voice, and possibly others, are no longer in our podcast feeds. You’ll also get a prediction for how video podcasts may themselves be facing a pivot, postulated by Ryan Broderick, the man behind the excellent Garbage Day newsletter.
Podcast promotional clips eat their masters
July of this year was not a happy time for me in terms of my media diet. First, Slate Culture Gabfest shut down after 18 years. And after 16 years, Mike Pesca’s The Gist met the same fate. Although I haven’t learned a reason for why the former podcast folded, Pesca was forthcoming about his, in a conversation about current podcast economics. The TL;DR in one word: Algorithms:
The co-host of Scott Galloway’s Prof G podcast, [Ed Elson], put out a social media clip, saying “Our clips are not only much more seen than the show. They’ve essentially become the show, when people think about who’s Scott Galloway and me, the sidekick. They only think about the clips on social media.”
So [the business model] has become inverted. Rather than having promotional materials for the show, the show becomes in service of these promotional materials. It is solely a vehicle to cut social media clips. [Ed was saying the clips were also] a major if not main way that the show made money: The promotional material about the show. And … if I started to do these social media clips, which I tried, and if somehow I got good at it and I was making a ton of money at it, I might say all right, I’ll lean into that. But that was never the case.
One bright spot for me personally was that before The Gist shut down, I got my question answered on a long-standing segment of the show, called Is That Bullsh*t? You can listen to the 14-minute excerpt below:
Is This Current Pivot To Video Finally Ending?
That was a subheading in a recent Garbage Day newsletter. Ryan Broderick gives his reasoning for why he thinks the answer is Yes:
- YouTube has drastically changed what their front-facing metrics track — but not what they pay for you! Basically, opening a YouTube video now counts as a view, even though they’re still only paying you for “engaged views.”
- MS Now will soon be airing Crooked Media “podcasts,” which are really just talk shows. YouTube channels are simulcasting on Netflix.
- And I’m hearing from a lot of short-form creators lately that that entire realm is basically over if you want to make any real money.
“As for what’s next, my prediction is a complete hollowing out of the video middle class, as it were. Professionally produced studio shows and random people talking into their phones and basically nothing in between.”
Time will tell. If it does, maybe on-demand audio, the “theater of the mind,” will experience an economic resurgence.