The Business Of Podcasting

Dr Juliet Bourke  00:03

What's a piece of marketing that really grabbed your attention recently? Was it in a newspaper or on a billboard? Was it a TV ad or a radio jingle? Probably not. When social media marketing came along, it allowed businesses to bypass traditional media altogether and go direct to their customers. In 2025, the marketing mix for any business is much more complex. And while your company probably has a Facebook and Instagram page, there's a powerful new way that customers are increasingly engaging with brands.

James Cridland  00:41

A podcast is something that you are leaning in to listen to. You are taking note of everything which is being said. Podcasting is a habitual thing. You listen to the same podcast every single week. You get used to hearing those voices in your life. 

Dr Juliet Bourke  00:57

Podcasting is a medium many businesses are already tapping into. Atlassian has the Teamistry podcast, which tells the stories of high performing teams. Gatorade has a podcast, so do McDonald's, Beyond Blue and Commonwealth Bank. Even cosmetics company Sephora has a show called Lip Stories. But how do you produce a podcast that gives value to an audience and also builds your brand?

James Cridland  01:26

Mozilla, the people that made the Firefox browser, they had a podcast for a long time which was how to keep yourself safe online, which is a great subject for a podcast. The fact that it came to you by Mozilla, and the fact that clearly every so often they would mention the Firefox browser, doesn't necessarily take away from the fact that it was a very interesting show all about keeping safe online.

Dr Juliet Bourke  01:59

This is The Business Of, a podcast from UNSW's Business School. I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Management and Governance. James Cridland is the editor of Podnews, a world leading podcast industry newsletter. He's followed the growth of podcasting since the early 2000s.

James Cridland  02:20

So the first thing that is normally agreed to be a podcast was a conversation, very much like the interview that we are doing now, and it was talking about the possibilities of adding audio onto blogging. Because, of course, there was no such word as podcast at that time. Now, the reason why I couched that a little bit by saying "the first thing that most people agree is a podcast" is that actually three years previous, Robin Williams, the comedian, was doing a podcast, which I would call a podcast. He was recording, in his house in San Francisco, his friends that would come round, and he would record interviews with those friends in his house. They would be available on the Audible platform, which of course is still going these days. You could download that to a portable audible player, as it was called, and you could take that interview with you. Now I would call that a podcast, lots of other people get very upset if I even mention this as being a podcast. But again, isn't that interesting? Because that, again, is very editorially similar to a lot of the shows that we have now, where you've got somebody who is a well known celebrity who is using those celebrity connections in order to do a long form interview show where the audio quality is less important than the content of the show if you like. So regardless of what you think of as the first podcast, I think those two were pretty good equivalents to what we have today. 

Dr Juliet Bourke  03:58

What was the sentiment like at the time when podcasting came in? Was it welcome? Was it even understood?

James Cridland  04:06

I think it was very, very technical at the beginning. In that, of course, podcasting wasn't even available on an iPod, that took its time. I think that was the middle of 2005. So you needed very complicated programs, there wasn't really a directory, it was just very, very hard. We forget what our internet was like back in those days. You had to tie up your phone line in order to connect to the internet, and there would be mums saying, "I want to make a telephone call. Who's on the internet right now?" And all of these things, so we forget how clunky the whole thing was and the fact that the internet wasn't in mobile phones. Here we are now, where 90 per cent of podcasts are listened to on a mobile phone, but back in those days the internet wasn't on mobile phones, you had to have a separate mp3 player and some complicated software on your laptop and an internet connection. So it was a very, very niche thing.

Dr Juliet Bourke  05:06

And presumably, platforms like Spotify and Apple Music enabled podcasts to have searchability and a broader audience. Was that a key factor in them becoming a big thing? 

James Cridland  05:21

Yeah, I think there are a couple of different things. Firstly, Apple jumping in to the podcast world. They got a directory of all of the podcasts which were out there at the time. So that was a tremendous step forward. And then you had the content side, and as more larger broadcasters jumped in and started mentioning podcasts on the radio that was a great step forward. And obviously you've got the ABC and Conversations here, you've got the BBC and the things that they were doing, NPR and so on. But you also had the beginnings of true crime podcasts, which have really pushed the medium in quite a an interesting way. Listened to predominantly by women, very different audience than the tech bros that listen to many of the other shows. And of course, the big daddy of the true crime show was the Serial podcast. And Serial was just massive. 

Serial Podcast  06:18

I mean, he's not describing a crime of passion here. This is something much darker. To methodically map out the death of your friend. 

James Cridland  06:25

And all of a sudden that kick started that whole new medium. You know, I mean, I remember at the time when people were coming up to me and saying, "What episode are you up to? I'm up to number five. I think you did it." It's an incredible moment. Probably a moment that we won't get again.

Dr Juliet Bourke  06:43

You mentioned radio, the broadcasters. Was there a tension when this new product, podcasting, disrupted that existing business model?

James Cridland  06:53

I think there was a lot of antagonism at the beginning, but there again, there was a lot of people who had been, for whatever reason, frozen out of the broadcast world and wanted a space to get their voice heard. And so podcasting was, and remains, a great place for them to end up doing that. I mean, I would say, you know, the front cover of Wired Magazine in 2005 had a picture of a radio on the front cover with a bullet going through it and a big sign saying "The End Of Radio". It was very much seen by some people, particularly in the tech world, as "Well this is it for radio, podcasting is here and podcasting will take over." And as we know, that's simply not really happened. Podcasting, yes, is listened to by a lot of people. Radio listened to by a whole lot more.

Dr Juliet Bourke  07:42

And why the differentiation between the two? Because, of course, it's evolved into, as you said, that radio is now doing podcasts as well.

James Cridland  07:51

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, radio was there going "We're making this great audio. We can repurpose it." I think it's interesting, if you look at the French podcast industry even today they have two different words for podcasting. They have a "podcast" and then they have a "native podcast". And what they mean by a "native podcast" is a podcast which hasn't been broadcast on the radio already. So I think that that's interesting, that the French have gone even that far in actually saying there is a distinction between what I sometimes rather meanly call "reheated radio", and a podcast which has been specifically built for the medium. And there are, you know, differences in terms of how you actually make that, of course.

Dr Juliet Bourke  08:36

There's at heart, a value in podcasting which is only now coming into itself, I suppose. What is that value? Why do people like podcasts so much?

James Cridland  08:48

I think one of the differences between say podcasts and radio, is that 91-92 per cent of all podcasts are listened to on headphones. So that's a very different experience to the radio where it's often on in the background. It's an accompaniment to your life, whereas a podcast is something that you are leaning in to listen to. You are taking note of everything which is being said, so it's a very different experience, I think there. I think also the biggest podcasters have realised that podcasting is a habitual thing. You get used to hearing those voices in your life. You get... you know, I'm trying desperately to avoid the word "intimate", because that's a bingo word whenever you talk about podcasting "it's intimate." But I guess it is, isn't it? You know, it's those voices which are quite literally in your ears, and you get to know these people from week to week to week.

Dr Juliet Bourke  09:48

And who then doesn't listen to podcasts? Who doesn't want that intimate relationship with someone who's in their ear?

James Cridland  09:58

Well, I know right. Who? Who would make that choice? If you look at radio, for example, radio is by and large listened to by people over the age of 45. Yes, young people still listen, but the majority of listening hours is done by people over the age of 45. If you look at podcasting, it's the reverse. So by and large, younger people are listening to much more podcasts. So I think that that's part of it, but I think also for quite a lot of people, they're perfectly happy with the audio and the choices that they have, and they don't understand, you know, the opportunities that exist in the podcasting world. And I think it does come back to the podcast name. It's not broadcast, it's not there to reach as many people as possible. You can be as niche as you like with a podcast, and I think that's one of the interesting things about it. And for some people who've grown up with very generalised radio output, you know, they haven't yet realised "Oh, so if I'm really interested in, I don't know, carpentry with oak, and then I can find an oak carpentry podcast." Yes, absolutely you can, and there are probably 15 of them, you know. So I think that that's one of the benefits, but also one of the strange things if you've grown up tuning into the radio.

Dr Juliet Bourke  11:21

So then let's talk about the business model associated with podcasting, because obviously some people... Robin Williams if he's doing the first podcast, is doing it just to sort of interview his friends and have fun. But podcasting is an industry now. So how do you make money out of podcasting? 

James Cridland  11:40

Well, indeed, what Robin Williams was doing all the way back then is he was charging for his show, as quite a few people are doing now. So, if you want to, you can sell your show on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify or through other places. Now that really only works if it's very large shows. What typically happens is you end up having an ad free version of your podcast with special additional features that you end up paying for, but that's certainly one way is to charge for shows. The more typical way is advertising. And the advertising really fits into two models. It fits into advertising that interrupts us and we have one person talking to us about a bank, and then another person talking to us about dietary supplements or something, and then it comes back. You know, a very sort of radio experience. Or there's a bit more of a podcast experience, which is that the podcast host will all of a sudden turn around and say, "This show is sponsored by such and such. Let me tell you about them." And for two minutes you hear a voice that you trust telling you about a product or a service that have paid to be there. It's very clearly an advertisement, or at least it should be, but it's a very different form of advertising, and works tremendously well. The final, sort of, two methods of making money is, firstly, to take your show on the road, to take it into theaters and charge for live experiences and things. And there are a large number of shows doing that now, which is interesting. And then finally, there's the concept of... some people called it "value for value". There's the concept of people saying, "I really enjoy this show, I want to give some money to the creator", and that might be $5 it might be $50. So there's a great range of different ways of making money out of podcasting, if you like. Obviously advertising being the main one. I think one of the interesting things around the business model is actually 90 per cent of podcasts, roughly, don't contain any advertising at all. We tend to look at the top shows, which do have advertising in them, and go, "Well, that's how all podcasts are." But they really aren't. You know, there's a tremendous long tail of shows which simply don't contain any advertising at all, and it's just a labor of love for that person that is putting that show together.

Dr Juliet Bourke  14:10

Not only are advertisers placing ads in podcasts, but many brands are now creating entire podcasts of their own. Why has it become so compelling for a business to create its own show?

James Cridland  14:23

These are typically called a "branded podcast". So for example, Mozilla, the people that made a Firefox browser, they had a podcast for a long time which was how to keep yourself safe online. Which is a great subject for a podcast. The fact that it came to you by Mozilla, and the fact that, clearly, every so often they would mention the Firefox browser, doesn't necessarily take away from the fact that it was a very interesting show all about keeping safe online. So I think that there's quite a lot to be said for those sorts of things. And clearly there are people that just want to be known as a subject specialist. They want to be known as the person that knows more about the law than anybody else, or, you know, air conditioning than anybody else. And so therefore they will make a podcast just purely for their own personal brand to get the fact that they know more about air conditioning than anybody else. I mention air conditioning because there is someone who has done exactly that. I think the last time I looked, he was earning a quarter of a million dollars a year in America, quarter of a million dollars a year, by making this air conditioning show. Because he realised, of course, that you've got all of these air conditioning installers and people who work in air conditioning driving from job to job to job and so therefore they need things to listen to. Perfect place to have a podcast there.

Dr Juliet Bourke  15:46

And what's your advice to people if they're thinking about starting a podcast? To do this sort of branded podcast... the air conditioning example. What's your advice? Do it. Don't do it. Why would you do it? Why would you not do it?

James Cridland  15:59

I think, firstly, make sure that you understand why you are doing a podcast. To earn some money is not a good enough reason, so go away and have a better reason. 

Dr Juliet Bourke  16:09

Why is that not a good enough reason? 

James Cridland  16:10

Because you need to be doing something more than just sitting there and earning money. Why would you earn money out of that? You'll earn money out of that because you've got lots of people listening to that particular podcast. Why will you have lots of people listening to that podcast? It's not because you're going to make money out of it. You'll have lots of people listening to that podcast if it's helpful to them, if it changes their mind about something, if it educates them about certain things. You know, there are foundations, for example, in the US that have paid for podcasts all about people who are incarcerated at the moment, and probably shouldn't be, because you can see very clearly that these are innocent people and they are still stuck in prison for some reason. And so there are foundations who are using podcasting as a storytelling medium to educate the public about that sort of thing. So again, what's your purpose? Why are you doing this podcast in the first place? There are lots of different ways of thinking about why you might run a podcast, and some of it is to make money out of that thing, but some of it is to be seen as a thought leader for the business that you are in. And I think, you know, that's just as valid a reason to go and start a show. "I want to be seen as the person that understands this particular field", whether it's air conditioning, whether it's oak carpentry, whatever it might end up being. It's probably not going to be something that you can instantly jack in your day job and become the next Joe Rogan. I mean, you know, Joe Rogan has been doing that show for over 12 years, so it takes time. The second thing I would say is stick with it. Most podcasts fail after five individual episodes. They just go away. People, firstly, find out how difficult it is, how hard work it is, they've not necessarily got their workflow in place, and workflow is a massive thing to get right in terms of how you record a podcast and indeed any creative endeavour. And so make sure that you get that right and make sure that you can actually keep on going. It typically takes a podcast maybe 18 months to really find its feet. But then there's plenty of research, as you'll know, around... I think some people talk about the 10,000 hour thing, where you only get good at something after you've done it for 10,000 hours. And I think that you can very clearly say that about the whole experience of making a podcast.

Dr Juliet Bourke  18:43

So it's definitely a long term investment. What else should business owners consider when deciding whether or not it's the right move for their brand? 

James Cridland  18:51

I mean, I think one of the things, particularly this year, is to forget everybody that is talking about video podcasts, and "You've got to be recording this in video, and you've got to get a beautiful looking studio and everything else." You can absolutely forget that. Yes, video podcasting is a thing, and you can do that if you like, but video podcasting adds so many hurdles to just getting a show out. And the best advice about starting a podcast is, just start it. Get it out there. Just start publishing. Start making something, even if no one listens to it, so that you can become good before you tell your family and friends, "Oh, I've been doing a podcast for the last two weeks or for the last two months." That's the most important thing. And if you add video into that mix that will significantly confuse things and just make it far, far harder. So my advice would be, forget all of that. You can always focus on that in two years time, just get a podcast out. Just start doing a podcast in audio, because it's by far the easiest thing to do.

Dr Juliet Bourke  19:59

So you've got consistency, you're doing habit, you're doing keeping it simple. You've got an interesting topic, but so do 10 other people. How do you stand out? 

James Cridland  20:08

So quite a lot of this is around marketing and marketing your particular show. Because your show can be the best in the world, but if you haven't told anybody about it then you've got a problem there. So it's making sure that as many people as possible who are interested in that particular area know about your show. So that might mean, if you go back to the oak carpentry example that I gave, that might mean, for example, that you go into the oak carpentry forums on the internet, of which there will be many all talking about how they're cutting their pieces of oak down to make furniture. And you can go in there, and you can be helpful. Not go in there and spam your show, but go in there and be helpful and say, "Oh, interesting you asked about wax polish, because three weeks ago we had somebody on talking about wax polish, and he said this." You know, that's a great way to add value to the communities that you're serving and pull people in. So that's one way of standing out. But I guess, you know, another way of standing out, just on the very basics, is make sure you have an obvious podcast name, so that people find it when they search. I wouldn't call it, "Wood you believe it?" I would call it, "Oak carpentry." That would be better than a weak pun. So things like that is important. And, you know, making sure that you get artwork correct, so that people understand that, and have a website so that you can point people towards a website. That's an obvious thing, but quite a lot of people kind of forget about that. One thing I would say is there are an awful lot of podcasts out there, there are 4.2 million podcasts. 4.2 million is a big number. 

Dr Juliet Bourke  21:47

Is that saturation? 

James Cridland  21:48

Is it saturation? Well, 4.2 million we've got but actually, if you look at the amount of shows which are being updated on a monthly basis, it's only 300,000. So already, 90 per cent of those shows have gone away because they're not being continually updated. And you don't have to be continually updating a podcast, of course, but certainly if you are out there and competing with other shows, all of a sudden you realise that there are only a third of a million out there. It's actually quite easy to do in comparison to what you thought that you might have to do. So that makes it a little bit easier. And certainly, if you start looking at some of the more esoteric categories in the podcast apps, then you can see that there aren't too many podcasts about swimming, about competitive swimming, or about, you know, badminton, or whatever these niche audiences might be. But there are an awful lot of people who swim and an awful lot of people who play badminton, so actually I don't think that we're anywhere near a saturation yet. And I mean, certainly I seem to remember a stat that says that there are 10 million books that are published every single year. And that may or may not be correct. I may have completely made that up, but there are certainly more books that are made every year than podcasts which have been made ever.

Dr Juliet Bourke  23:12

Market disruption due to a new product or technology happens across all industries. Although it can be frustrating for some, Barney Tan – the Senior Deputy Dean for Impact and Partnerships at the UNSW Business School – says that overall, there are benefits to disruption.

Barney Tan  23:31

When a new disruptive product enters a market, it often shakes things up in a way that benefits consumers directly. For instance, these innovations typically bring a new value proposition in the form of perhaps greater convenience, lower costs and improved service quality. They also drive incumbent firms to innovate because they suddenly face a competitor that tends to be more agile, tech savvy, and they're delivering a more compelling value proposition. So essentially, the pressure to adapt pushes incumbent firms to upgrade their processes and offerings, which tends to lead to better choices for the market overall. A great example is Uber's entry into the taxi industry. Uber didn't just offer rides, they transformed the whole experience with a seamless app-based platform with dynamic pricing, with real time tracking and also a two way reviewing and rating system. So this actually shifted consumer expectations. They also changed the experience of the ride itself. Traditional taxi services, which relied on conventional dispatch systems and static pricing, suddenly found themselves under pressure to modernise, and this actually showcases how disruptive innovation can redefine an entire industry. According to research that I conducted of a ride sharing platform in China, traditional firms, like established taxi companies, often try to respond by upgrading their technology and launching similar digital platforms of their own. These platforms don't tend to do as well as the disruptor. So these incumbent firms might invest in new IT systems or diversify their services in an attempt to catch up, but these adaptations frequently run into significant hurdles. They face the challenges of having legacy systems, they may have rigid regulatory frameworks that are not in their favor, they may also find difficulties in attracting tech talents. The study that I conducted described this as the process of "digital attrition". Disruptive innovations are pretty common across various sectors. So besides Uber think about Airbnb, for instance, which completely transformed the hospitality industry by enabling people to book unique stays directly from hosts. This forced traditional hotels to rethink their service models. Another example would obviously be the automotive industry, where you have electric vehicles that are digitally enabled, smart, and they are becoming increasingly autonomous. So we have autonomous driving technology that, for example, are pushing established car manufacturers to innovate rapidly or risk being left behind. So these cases illustrate that disruption is a recurring and prevalent phenomenon, reshaping markets and compelling companies to adapt or face obsolescence.

Dr Juliet Bourke  26:21

Thanks to James Cridland for being part of this episode. You can find his Podnews newsletter linked in our show notes if you want to subscribe. The Business Of is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset Studios. To stay up to date with our latest podcasts, as well as the latest insights and thought leadership from the business school, subscribe to business think at businessthink.unsw.edu.au.