097: My 2023 Podcast Predictions and Why Podcasting Is NOT a Dying Industry
Despite some recent industry panic (see links below), the podcast bubble HAS NOT burst and isn’t going to anytime soon. The ad revenue landscape might be changing, but if you’ve been listening to my podcast for awhile now, you know that there are so many other – and better – ways to use your podcast to generate revenue. (And in case you’re new, I’ll share some of these ways in my 2023 podcast predictions.)
That means as small business podcasters, we’re uniquely positioned to have an amazing 2023. I have six 2023 podcast predictions that’ll help you stay ahead of the game and leave you feeling confident about sharing your voice and your business. I’m so excited for the podcast industry this year, so let’s get into it!
#1: Podcast monetization is going to shift away from ads and toward content-based revenue.
The ad industry as a whole has taken a big hit this last year, and podcast ads are no exception. But that doesn’t mean your podcast can’t make money for you. Instead this year, we’re going to see the industry continue to shift away from an advertising model and into more content-based revenue, meaning more subscriptions, more courses, more workshops and events, etc. Podcasts are going to continue to become the cornerstone of how many business owners develop relationships with their listeners and warm-up leads so they can guide them through their sales funnel.
And as a podcaster whose main goal is using your podcast to drive leads and revenue for your small business, this is perfect, because this is a strategy that we already use! I don’t sell ads for my podcast and neither do most of our Wild Home Podcasting clients. But we do promote courses, engage with potential clients, and offer other ways to access our expertise through our biggest and most engaged platform: our podcasts
#2: Podcasting is going to get less formulaic and more creative.
Funny quip, then intro, then interview or discussion, then ad, then outro.
Does that sound familiar? It’s how most podcasts are structured, and there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s a format that’s easy for listeners to navigate and keeps the production process easy and organized. But it’s not the only way to structure an episode, and I think 2023 is the year where we’re going to see more risks and more creativity in the way podcasters plan and organize their seasons and episodes. Wild Home Podcasting is here for it!
#3: Video is going to continue to grow and become more important, both in the video podcast space and in social content.
Like it or not (especially those of us who are acclimated to audio only), video podcasting is here to stay. Youtube is one of the biggest platforms for consuming podcasts and started their own podcast category page this year. And it’s only going to grow. Utilizing video as another avenue for listeners to reach your podcast and to promote your podcast on social platforms is going to be integral to your podcast success within a year or two.
There are a ton of ways to turn your audio podcast into a video, pull clips for promotion on multiple platforms, and use video to drive organic and search traffic. The possibilities for video are endless, and 2023 is the year to form a plan for how you’ll incorporate video into your podcast workflow. (And if you need strategy help mapping this out, send us a message! We offer strategy sessions that’ll map out the course you need to take and give you actionable steps to get there!)
#4: Podcast listenership will continue to become more diverse.
Let’s be real: in its infancy, the podcast world felt a lot like a boys-only club. But for the last decade or so, podcast listeners have become increasingly more diverse as more BIPOC and female listeners found their place. This trend is only going to continue, and some experts are projecting that women will overtake men in podcast listener numbers within the next 2-3 years. That means that female-led online businesses (like us here at Wild Home Podcasting!) are perfectly positioned to find new audiences and reach new leads in 2023 and beyond.
#5: Accessibility (and the expectation of accessibility) will become the standard in podcasting.
Accessibility is a huge value for us at Wild Home Podcasting, and we’re confident that 2023 is going to be the year where it becomes industry-standard. That means captioning for videos, transcriptions for podcast episodes, image descriptions and alt-text for related marketing and promotional materials, and more. Podcasting is for everyone, and accessibility is overdue!
#6: Creating connections with listeners outside of episodes will be crucial for podcast success in 2023.
Internal search for most podcast apps is kind of a mess. Each platform has a different algorithm and none of them are very good at matching interests to more niche podcasts. That doesn’t mean that you’ll never find new listeners, it just means that you need to rely on more than just Spotify’s algorithm to reach them.
In 2023, creating relationships and interacting with listeners outside of just your podcast episodes is going to be one of your most important growth strategies. Using relational and organic marketing and clever search optimization is going to be the best way to reach your ideal client and create the closest bond with your listeners. (If this sounds overwhelming for you, send us a message! Our strategy offering can give you a roadmap for how to start!)
So, don’t listen to the negativity: the podcast bubble has not burst. Not only that, but this new podcasting landscape in 2023 is going to favor us as small business podcasters in so many ways. It’s our year! I can’t wait to see what we all accomplish.
Are you ready to make 2023 the year you finally start your podcast and get your voice into the world? Join us for our free 3-day Podcast Launch Challenge on Jan 23rd-25th 2023! We’ll help you get clarity on your podcast goals and walk you through the logistics of getting your podcast started!
Links:
Sign up for our free 3-day Podcast Launch Challenge
The Great Podcast Marketing Bubble from Bloomberg
2023 Podcast Industry Forecast from Pacific Content
Launch Your Podcast with Us in 2023!
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The Transcript for Podcast Your Business:
097: My 2023 Podcast Predictions and Why Podcasting Is NOT a Dying Industry
[00:00:40] Caroline Hull Are you ready to start a strategic podcast for your business and share your message in a way that feels wildly authentic? This is the place. Welcome to Podcast Your Business, where each week I share the strategy behind having a podcast that helps grow your business. I'm Caroline Hull, podcast manager, strategist and consultant, and I've seen the power a podcast can have for your business. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. It feels so good to be recording again after taking a little bit of a break. And, you know, I'm glad I took a break because it really helped me to kind of reach channels and passion and energy into talking about all the things that we've been talking about. And I've been doing a lot of content planning the past few days, kind of jumping back into it, right. And this episode actually was not on the schedule, but this was something that we really felt needed to be talked about. And so we move things around. I planned out this episode and I'm really excited to share it with all of you.
[00:01:47] But before I dive in and wanted to let you know about two things that are happening this month that are pretty big. One of them is we are bringing back our launch challenge. Now. I have not done a launch challenge, I think since 2020, maybe 2019, and it used to be like an email series and we've completely revamped the launch challenge and it's going to be a free and live event. It takes place in a community hub and there's going to be videos each day as well as a workbook. Again, this is totally free and if you want to join that, it's Wild Home Podcast income slash launch challenge. We're going to put the link in the show notes. And then leading out of this is something that I'm really excited to be bringing back, which is my launch Pod 90 day accelerator course for people who are ready to launch a course but aren't ready to completely outsource the entire launch and want to do it themselves. And the neat thing about the way this course works is we go through it together. So you do the lessons on your own. They're released in phases and each month is a different phase. This is actually based on the framework that we use to launch our clients with our launch packages. And then throughout the month there will be office hours, there will be Q&A, live events. And we're also in a community where you have access to me at any point if you need help with anything. So it really is like a group accelerator, pod coaching kind of thing. I wanted it to be a hybrid, so you weren't on your own, so you had the support that you need to actually get the thing done and launch the podcast that you've been talking about launching for so long. And so we will put the link to that in the show notes as well. I'm really excited to be bringing back this course. I've run it a few times and it is truly one of my favorite things to do. I love it so much. It's so much fun. So if you are wanting to launch podcast and do a little bit of DIY, we would love to have you.
[00:04:00] Okay, so today I wanted to chat about I don't know if you've noticed, but in the podcasting world right now, there is a lot of talk about the podcasting bubble bursting and we're seeing this through a lot of the bigger podcast companies who kind of invested a lot of money in podcasting are starting to lay off people. They're downsizing. We've even had a couple of platforms dissolve or be bought by other companies, and it seems like something is shifting in the podcast world a little bit. Granted, you know, podcasting is still relatively young when we think about media and everything that occurs in the lifetime of of media, it's still relatively young and it didn't really start picking up steam very much until I would say about five years ago, kind of around the time that I started maybe seven or eight years ago, because it would be around the time that I really started working on podcasts myself. Originally, podcasting was like. I equate it to like radio shows, you know, that was pretty much all you had. And then we started having an influx of experts starting podcasts to talk about what they knew, what they taught, what services they offered, that kind of thing. And that's where podcasting for businesses kind of came into play and where we have landed today. But I wanted to chat about kind of this shift because if you are a business owner who has a podcast and you're reading about all of this, you may say to yourself, How is this going to impact me? Does this mean that I shouldn't be putting too much time and effort into my podcast? The answer right away is no. So get excited to hear all my reasons why not. So I wanted to break this down a little bit for you. So I'm going to be referencing a few articles and I'm going to be sure to put links to all of those in show notes. And I highly recommend you read them if this is something you're interested in, because it's really good to hear perspectives on the podcasting industry as a whole and where it is and where it's going. And even though it does, like I said, seem like there is a shift, I think the outlook is really, really great, especially for podcasts like ours. So this article came out, it's in a Bloomberg article, and it's the one that I'm going to reference the most here at the start. And it talks about has the podcast bubble burst. And I started reading it and honestly, I just kind of pushed to the side because it did not it did not really affect anything that we do here or the type of forecasting that we do. It really, really talked about, you know, ads and monetization. And so it really got my team and I thinking about how this affects the work that we do. And so I wanted to just kind of dissect all this and give you an outlook for Small Business podcast in 2023 and what you can do to make sure that you're maximizing your podcast and how it works for you and your business. I do not think the bubble has burst.
[00:07:20] I do, however, think that there is a shift in podcast monetization. So when new clients come to us, a lot of times when they're starting their podcast, they say, you know, Oh, I want to have a podcast, I want to get lots of downloads. I can get sponsors that can make money for my podcast. And one of the things that we have tried to do at Wild Home Podcast is really shift the perspective on this, because for business owners who have podcasts, the goal should not be to have sponsors. The goal should be creating an ecosystem of content that converts your listeners into buyers, right? So we want to take listeners from the podcast, bring them into our world and sell them the things that we do. So when we think about that, as you come across these articles, you really have to look at it from a different perspective. They are talking about podcasts, big podcasts, story oriented podcasts, news telling, podcasts that rely on ads for their revenue. And these are all the big names that you're thinking of, right? All the big podcasts that we listen to usually have ads in some form, and that's how they make money to pay for production and all the other things. So I really think that this is going to shift and we're already seeing a little bit of it in the form of subscriptions. But I really believe that ads are going to go away and we're going to be looking at more content based revenue.
[00:08:55] So when I say content based revenue, I am talking about courses, I am talking about workshops, I am talking about the subscription model, which I mentioned, and you may see this popping up a lot, but a lot of these bigger podcasts have moved to having some form of subscription where you can either get access to episodes early or you can get access to special episodes. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that. So when we talk about content based revenue, what does this mean for us? And this is actually really, really good for everything that I have been talking about strategy wise on this podcast on Instagram with my clients. Because what we want to do again, is convert listeners to be buyers of your things, right? Of your services, your products.
[00:09:46] And so if that's the shift we're going to start seeing, we're doing great. We're doing all of the things that we need to be doing, right. And so I really do think that means that we are going to be able to start pushing more of these, like I said, courses, resources that people can purchase and download or even download for free that leads into other things. I really think that we are going to start seeing a shift in the bigger podcast to these types of things as well. And I think the reason being, again, the ad model isn't necessarily working because what do ads rely on? Well, they rely on downloads. And as I've talked about a lot, sometimes that metric is very misleading for podcasts because, yes, that may be the number of people listening, but are they the right listener for your podcast and are they going to actually buy and do the thing? I mean, there are podcasts outside of business, podcasts that I listen to with my kids, for instance, and they have ads. And I can tell you right now, I have never once gone and clicked on the ad in the shownotes to purchase whatever, but when the podcast I was listening to with my kids said, We're doing live shows, you know that I went and I tried to see if there was a live show in our area and I live bought tickets because they're such fans. You see the difference there. I think that's a really good example right off the bat of the shift in listeners and how we view content and things like that.
[00:11:14] So that is my first big prediction for 2023 and forward. I really think we're going to start seeing this moving forward. If you're doing ads, if you're selling ads and it's it's successful and it's working for you, fantastic. Keep doing it. I don't think it's going to quit overnight, but I do think that we're going to see a decrease in that. And so, you know, if you want to make the shift, one of the things that we tell our clients to do all the time is to make ads for their own products, Right? You don't even need to have ads. But if you want to have ads, which are really great, you know, create some evergreen ads and start rotating them in your episodes so your listeners aren't listening to the same thing over and over and over, but it gives you an opportunity to share a product that you are selling a membership, of course, whatever.
[00:12:01] The other thing too is, you know, we talk a lot about knowing your listener path, knowing if they come from the episode and they click on this link, where does that take them? Where does that take them, where does that take them? So on and so forth. And that's going to be really important as we talk about content based revenue. And honestly, I just think this is so great for us because as business owners you have podcasts are podcasts are literally giant pieces of content to support our businesses. And so right away we're already tapping into that. And it's just we're going to fly through this the reverse adjustment in the podcast world without any problems. And so that's one of the first things that I think is really key. And it's really important to talk about as you see these articles talking about the podcast bubble bursting, or is podcasting still worth it? It absolutely is for building authority and for sharing what you know and what you do, because podcast listeners are increasing. So listenership is increasing, right? The actual number of people in the world who are listening to podcasts is getting greater every year. So I find it quite interesting that we're seeing ad revenue decreasing. It's kind of fascinating. I really think it's like this overall shift of how people are interacting with goods and services, which, you know, is a conversation that's bigger than this. But I think it's kind of this natural shift that we're seeing in the times that we're living in. Right. And so how can we adjust while we just keep doing what we're doing and we keep making sure that we're putting out strategic content that leads people to our programs and our services?
[00:13:47] So some other predictions that I have based on what I've read, but also this is also based on what I've seen and there are some other articles that I'm not necessarily referencing that I'm going to link in the show notes that have a lot of this information as well. There's a really great one that has different people in the podcast industry sharing what they think are going to be the trends. That is a really fascinating one to read because everybody has a different idea, and I love hearing all of it because as I said, podcasting is still a relatively young media and I tell my clients all the time, it's a little bit like the Wild West. You know, you can really do whatever you want. There is room to be creative.
[00:14:28] And that's actually one of the things that I think is going to grow is creativity. And what I mean by creativity growing is I think we're going to see a lot more people shaking up the structure of podcasts, going to shorter intros, just doing things differently in the episodes and how they're put together. And I'm here for that and I love that. And so if you're one of my clients, I'm going to try something new. Let's do it. I love it. We know we like to do that too. We like to throw in clips and things like that every once in a while at the beginning of the episode as Hooks and I feel like that kind of creativity is only going to increase.
[00:15:07] I really think video as it relates to podcasting is going to continue to grow and be an important part of the conversation. When we talk about how do I grow my podcast? Well, one of the ways is video, and as annoying as that is for all of us, because none of us want to be making video. That's why we podcast. That's not true. I know some of us love video, but I do think that video is going to become more and more important. And we're seeing this in like YouTube creating a podcast page and encouraging podcasters to post their videos of them recording or even just static images with the audio and captions on their platform. I think that's one way video is going to continue to grow, and that's really easy. So that again, if that's something that you're already doing, if you're already filming yourself and you have time to put together a video or your podcast manager can do that, we would be happy to help you do that as well. And that really, you know, it's not a huge thing to add on and it could be really great for your podcast. I also think video as it relates to like social media. So I've been experimenting with TikTok and Instagram videos and I'm seeing traction. I'm seeing traction in both places. And so I just think that is a testament to how much consumers of social media are loving video. And so I think doing videos related to your podcast is going to be something to really add in, and it's going to be something that's only going to grow as you go into next year.
[00:16:46] In one of the articles that I read, they talk about listeners and how the make up of listeners is changing. And there was definitely some talk in the articles about how there are more by BIPOC listeners and there are more women listeners than before. And so I really think traditionally when we think about podcasts and like when podcasting first started, it was very much like a boys club. There were a lot of men podcasting and there were a lot of men listening, and we have seen that shifting over the years, which has been so great. I love diversity and podcasting. It just it makes me feel so good because one of the things I love about podcasting is sharing the ability to share voices from all over, from all cultures, from all walks of life. I mean, literally anyone can create a podcast, right? And that's what makes it so beautiful. And so to see that shift also happening and listeners and now that we have more diversity in listenership and I read in one of these articles that they predicted that women are going to overtake men as listeners. And I absolutely believe this. I think that we are going to see more and more women creating and listening to podcasts, and I think that's a great thing.
[00:18:15] I think accessibility is going to continue to be a really important discussion and something that is needs to grow and will continue to grow. So when I talk about accessibility, I'm talking about people of all abilities being able to absorb podcast content. And this is why like a really first step great example is that you need to be doing transcripts of your show and providing those. And that's something that we offer for our production level clients because we believe is so, so important. It can get pricey and it can get time consuming. But is it worth doing? Absolutely. And so I think that's only going to grow. I would love to see transcripts available in podcast apps and even ones that are timed. You know, Spotify does that with lyrics for music. And I think that if we could see that with podcast episodes across apps, I think that would be just amazing. So that is something that I want to see. It's something that I think we will probably start seeing, and I'm excited to see how that grows. And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about that I really think is going to become important.
[00:19:29] And I actually want to do an entire episode on this as it relates to business podcasts, and that is creating connection outside of episodes. More and more and more people are investing their time and their ears right to two specific podcasts and, you know, really diving in and downloading all the episodes and listening to all of them. And it's only natural that as people listen more and more and more to some of these podcasts that they want to see the other things that they do and connect with them in other ways. And I really think that's going to become an important piece of not only capturing your listeners and converting them, but also retaining them and having some way for them to connect with you. And that can be anything. It can be an email newsletter, it can be an Instagram where you talk about the podcast. You know, for me, that's close friends on Instagram. And it can also be a Facebook group and things like that. And so I think, again, that really ties in well to what we are already doing as business owners who have podcasts. But I think we're going to start seeing that more and more and more with other podcasts.
[00:20:39] So to wrap it up, everything that I have talked about, these are my predictions for what's going to happen with podcasting. Again, some of it based on my own experience and some of it based on what I've read. But what I really want to drive home is that the outlook for businesses who have podcast. So I'm going to say a business podcast is really, really good because the podcasting industry as a whole, I think, is shifting more towards a model that we are already using, right? And so that only means great things for us, and that also means that we are ahead of the game in a way. And what an amazing thing to know that the strategy that you are creating for your podcast now is something that other podcasts are going to emulate later. I just think that's really cool to think about.
[00:21:37] So as you are reading and going out into the world and hearing people talk about podcasting, I do not think the podcast bubble has burst. I think the shift of how podcasts get their revenue and what the purpose of podcasts are is going to really start shifting. And it's only going to shift in a direction that makes so much sense for business owners who have podcasts. So keep doing what you're doing. Keep leading customers from your podcast to your programs and services in a way that is strategic and makes sense and you're already ahead of the curve. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I had a lot of fun diving into this topic this week, and it's really fun also just to kind of think about the industry as a whole, because a lot of times we kind of get into our little business podcast bubble. So it was really neat to do some research and look at everything and see how it relates to us. We will have the links to everything that I talked about in the show notes, and again, if you want to connect with me further and we'll talk about either some of these topics or other things, you can join me on Instagram. Join my close friends list. You're just going to hop over to Instagram, DM, meet close friends, and you will be added to the list. And I do a free training every Thursday, so it's a really great place to come and chat about the podcast and other things as well. We will be back next week with a really great episode about content you are not going to want to miss. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Podcast Your Business. For more podcasting tips, follow us on Instagram at Wild Home Podcast. If you're ready to launch up level or grow your podcast, head to WildHomePodcast.com to get started today.
