Is podcasting actually dying?

Atthe end of last year (December 16th, to be exact; Bill Hicks’ birthday) I published a piece here on Medium called “2022: The Year That Podcasting Died”. It was a continuation of something I’ve been doing since I started my digital media company, Podot, which is to end the year with an audit of both personal and industrial trends and reflections. Are things going well? Are they heading in a positive direction? And what is my best guess for the near future? I gave it that title for two reasons: firstly, I wanted to reflect my broad pessimism about the continued viability of the open-RSS audio podcast as we’ve known it over the past decade, and, secondly, I wanted people to click on the article. As Jeff Vidler over at Signal Hill Insights noted the headline was intended to “target clicks more than they reflect the balance presented in the story itself”. But, so what? I’m a self-made man. My audience isn’t going to generate itself. I published that in December and pretty quickly Bloomberg followed up with a piece called “The Great Podcasting Market Correction” in which they argued that “the podcast boom is feeling like a thing of the past”. Now Bloomberg is a serious outlet, not some tinpot blog that a bloke in south London is writing for his own amusement (even if they did quote my piece in the opening, and drag me back into the discourse) — and it felt like this piece, particularly, along with one from Nick Quah in Vulture, got a really anxious conversation started. Is podcasting out of boom phase and into bust o’clock? And, on top of all that, Spotify announced a 6% total workforce layoff, including many from its podcast divisions, amidst rumours of a strategic rethink away from the big podcasting manoeuvres of recent years.

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