The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will not happen this year, but that does not mean all my prep notes for Cannes should stay in the drawer. A few thoughts over the next few weeks that relate to my ongoing coronavirus series.
8 April 2020 (Brussels, Belgium) – American life continues under stay-at-home orders (for the most part), and it’s all but certain to remain this way for some time. Within the podcast context, the looming question remains how listening behavior will continue to shift as Americans move out of a transition phase and settle into an extended period without significant travel – in particular the daily commute, widely considered one of the primary environments for podcast consumption.
Will listening pick back up as audiences find new ways to re-integrate their podcast habits back into their lives? Or will it continue to dip as other media formats … whether it’s YouTube or broadcast radio or Twitch … claim those habit gaps instead? More on that in my conclusion.
First, some hindsight numbers. Last night I jumped into the Podtrac analysis blog posts which illustrates how U.S. podcast listening had been impacted by the pandemic, using their measurement sample. That sample is significant but not total, and among the companies not included in their measurements is Stitcher, the Scripps-owned podcast company that operates one of the larger portfolios in the industry.
So let’s focus on them as a case study. Yesterday, Stitcher sent over some data points on how social distancing measures have affected listening across its shows, and here’s the big takeaway:
Overall listening across the Stitcher portfolio — that is, both owned-and-operated shows and shows they rep for ad sales — decreased 8 percent over the past four weeks relative to the first week of March — a stand-in baseline for the pre-pandemic environment. But there are signs that the listening decline may be leveling out.
By way of methodology, the company looked at hourly downloads across March, and broke the period up according to five labeled week-long stretches. Week 1 (March 2-8) was “Normal Times,” as in prior to COVID-19 social distancing measures; Week 2 (March 9-15) was “Initial Measures”; Week 3 (March 16-22) was “Aggressive Measures”; Week 4 (March 23-29) was when listeners were “Adjusting to the New Normal”; and Week 5 (March 30-April 5) was “New Normal.” The sample measured includes podcasts represented by Midroll, the sales arm of Stitcher, said to be around 200 shows, all of them hosted on Omny.
Using that framework, Stitcher saw:
• A 1 percent drop in listening in Week 2 (“Initial Measures”), compared to Week 1;
• A 11 percent drop in listening in Week 3 (“Aggressive Measures”), compared to Week 1;
• A 9 percent drop in listening in Week 4 (“Adjusting”), compared to Week 1; and
• A 11 percent drop in listening in Week 5 (“New Normal”), compared to Week 1.
It might take another week before we can feel good about saying a 9 to 11 percent decline is the “New Normal” here, but analysts see the past three weeks as largely stable in terms of listening. And so the big question, then, is whether we’re seeing a true leveling off with regards to the pandemic-related dip.
Like many others, Stitcher sees the absence of the morning commute as the primary cause of decrease in overall listening: Average listening between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. dropped about 20 percent, while average listening in other hours was down just 4 percent. By the start of April, their data saw a slight uptick in listening during non-commute hours, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the commute loss.
So that’s Stitcher. A few other data threads to peruse:
Podtrac has updated its study of the pandemic’s impact on listening data in its measurement pool through April 5. Among other things, their findings mirror the idea that the listening dip is leveling off over the past week, as was suggested in Stitcher’s data. You can find the full dive here :
• A Spotify blog post from March 30 said that the audio streaming platform has seen “increased interest in news podcasts,” and that they too have seen “an increase in the streaming of Kids & Family content.” No specific numbers provided, however. The broader context, from Rolling Stone: “Music Streaming Is Down in the Time of Social Distancing.”
• An Acast blog post from April 2 claims the company has seen its listening figures continuing to follow “the upward trajectory seen year on year — including record breaking listens (+8.4% globally) during the past two weekends.”
• According to The Hollywood Reporter, iHeartRadio is claiming to see podcast listening “up 6 percent month-over-month, a number that is even higher in cities where there are shelter-in-place mandates.”
• Meanwhile, Chartable, the podcast analytics company, dug into its own sample — which pulls data through its analytics used on over 7,000 client podcasts — and the resulting writeup provides some further texture to the overall listening dips. Personally, I’d ignore the bit on reviews and consider the discussion regarding the way they think about the “listen” metric.
Before we move on, let’s zoom back out for the bigger ad picture. From The New York Times:
Overall spending on digital ads for March and April is down 38 percent from what companies had expected to lay out, and ad spending has fallen 41 percent on TV, 45 percent on radio, 43 percent in print publications, and 51 percent on billboards and other outdoor platforms, according to the trade group IAB.
I credit a long-time mate for getting me into podcasts, Charles Christian, who is a writer, barrister, journalist and podcast/radio host. When I discussed the issue with him he said:
It’s safe to say that podcasting is taking a noticeable hit in the aggregate amid the coronavirus crisis and the behavioral changes it has prompted. And of course you need to consider the layers here. To start with, Podtrac’s findings only address the group of shows it measures, which is significant but not the total market.
From my perspective, we’re looking at a scenario where value may be being concentrated in a smaller group of players. And it’s not that much of a stretch to guess that most of those players are already bigger and well established.
I’m also inclined toward the idea that this is a uniquely difficult time for shows just starting out, podcasts with more casual appeal, and newer podcast talents that haven’t cultivated a strong following yet. Doubly so if they’re not offering coronavirus-related fare.
And another thread: the centrality of people’s commutes to podcast listening, along with other “in-between” contexts believed to be prime podcast consumption settings (working out, talking walks, and so on). Even this early, it’s evident that curtailing these prime settings has hurt podcast consumption. It raises questions about podcast programming as a whole, and more importantly, how we need to adapt to the moment.