Narrative Podcasts Are Disappearing (rollingstone.com) 44
The narrative podcast industry that exploded after Serial's 2014 debut has largely collapsed. Pineapple Street Studios shut down in June after producing hits like Missing Richard Simmons. Amazon dismantled Wondery in August, laying off 110 employees less than five years after acquiring the studio for $300 million. Spotify terminated Gimlet in 2023 despite paying $230 million for the company in 2019. Major outlets including Pushkin Industries and This American Life have conducted layoffs. Talk shows and celebrity podcasts continue growing while investigative audio series struggle to find funding. Edison Research reports 55% of Americans consumed podcasts last month, but advertising dollars are flowing to cheaper chat formats rather than resource-intensive narrative productions.
What? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone here understand what this is actually about?
Scripted podcasts with higher production values. Basically, the modern version of old time radio programs. Article is behind a paywall though, so there's nothing to see here anyway.
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I'm guessing that "narrative podcasts" and "investigative audio series" are industry terms for true-crime-style junk and whatever "Missing Richard Simmons" is. News for people who don't care about news.
It doesn't surprise me these companies are failing, people with an appetite for that stuff can gorge themselves on social media for free.
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Narrative Podcasts, I guess those are like old time radio plays: an audio production with voice actors and music and sound effects to tell a story. Everything old is new again.
Turns out these productions are too expensive to make, and even with increasing demand, ads can't generate enough revenue. So they're laying people off at the companies they paid millions for, and funding less expensive productions instead.
It's amusing to see someone reinvent the radio drama, then realize it's been done before and why
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Narrative Podcasts, I guess those are like old time radio plays: an audio production with voice actors and music and sound effects to tell a story. Everything old is new again.
Around 2012 or a bit later there were a large number of really great audio drama productions. The Truth was probably my favorite. Hello From the Magic Tavern and Welcome to Night Vale are also great. Think the latter two are still running.
I stopped listening a while back because I found other things I liked better, mostly non-fiction news and economics. I don't think they are big businesses but they're enough to keep a small crew employed.
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Yeah that's the sad part, I wonder what these companies could've produced if they weren't acquired and put through the corporate wringer. They don't necessarily need to turn a profit to make great radio dramas, maybe they could've made great content and just managed to cover costs.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Does anyone here understand what this is actually about?
Podcasts with any level of quality are losing out to podcasts that are essentially ragebait with a modern "comedic" spin that require little to any production value. Dickbags in their bedrooms don't need millions of dollars to create ragebait, while putting together a "narrative" podcast, either a true-crime type or a "Stuff You Should Know" type deep-dive into odd subjects, requires time, effort, and a bit of background research.
Of course advertisers want to fund the ragebait. It requires no effort at all to half pay attention to the news and then rant incoherently into a $100 microphone and interface for a few minutes, and creates the background effect of people needing to comment their continued rage somewhere, thus helping the advertisers further on whatever platform they direct the continued rage at. That's win-win for the advertisers, baby. And lose-lose for society as a whole, as it further denigrates our already diminished mental capacity by foisting yet more negative emotional feedback loops on people that aren't capable of disconnecting themselves from it.
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Of course advertisers want to fund the ragebait.
I'd put a nuance on it - it's not that advertisers prefer ragebait especially since it can come back and bite your brands in the ass when an angry host inevitably goes off the rails. Advertisers however seek the widest, most consistent audience, and this kind of angry content as you described is unfortunately what draws the most people. Nor do I think advertisers are the primary people to blame. The bigger blame falls on producers who'd rather chase the low cost, high listener content that maximizes profits
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Of course advertisers want to fund the ragebait.
I'd put a nuance on it - it's not that advertisers prefer ragebait especially since it can come back and bite your brands in the ass when an angry host inevitably goes off the rails. Advertisers however seek the widest, most consistent audience, and this kind of angry content as you described is unfortunately what draws the most people. Nor do I think advertisers are the primary people to blame. The bigger blame falls on producers who'd rather chase the low cost, high listener content that maximizes profits without a care for social value rather than take a risk on new content. Its not that different from television producers who chase cheap reality TV or Hollywood spawning a thousand sequels rather than gamble on original storytelling. Low risk, high profit for mentally addictive thought "drugs".
This is also why traditional news has managed to go completely off the rails. Low quality "bleeds it leads" content is much more eyeball grabbing than real reporting.
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Cheap slop pumped out quickly is outselling quality performances.
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that tracks,
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Cheap slop pumped out quickly is outselling quality performances.
It's an argument for a public broadcaster.
The free market argument is that if slop is what the people want, and the market gives it to them, that is success.
5 years? That's the plan (Score:2)
When a company disposes of another company at the 5yr mark it usually means that was the plan from day 1. Buying up companies and dismantling them right away can get your company scrutinized, but after 5 years "it just didn't work out" is an accepted answer to destroying valuable assets. (Especially when they can spend the time devaluing them too)
So you think the audio book industry loves these types of podcasts? Not at all.
Re:5 years? That's the plan (Score:4, Insightful)
The action you describe is pointless. Even if you believe there's some ulterior motive by which the company secretly profits by destroying an asset, that ignores that the workers who still possess the same skill set and can form or join some new company that produces the same product. All a company can achieve is wasting their own money as they lose business to some competitor that supplies what consumers want.
The audiobook industry can do nothing to stop these kind of podcasts from being made. If there were money to be made there, someone would seek to supply the product to consumers.
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Our economy has so many perverse incentives it can indeed be puzzling when you try applying the rules of your personal finances to understand business arrangements that are wholly different.
Destroyed assets are rarely the goal, but destruction of the company is accepted as collateral damage, in pursuit of personal enrichment.
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Trying to extend your personal finance analogy - still flawed, so don't put too much stock into it - it's like burning down your house for an insurance payment.
It may not be a thing you've ever done, it may not even be a good idea. But it certainly happens, and works enough of the time that it keeps happening.
Re: 5 years? That's the plan (Score:2)
Destroying your competition is a time honour tradition with companies.
Occasionally someone will restart a similar company, but usually the non-competes the original founders have when bought out are sufficient to prevent that. (Money and time change people's priorities, so having a 2 year industry reaction ends up being a lifetime of change).
Of course companies gut the assets then can use elsewhere, retailing the value they can; but destroying companies the feel compete within their markets is usually the p
Competition (Score:3)
If by some miracle your acquisition pans out that's great but the main goal is to make sure you control the entire space.
One of the real problems here is we are all thinking like people who have bills to pay instead of like a billionaire tossing money around from an unlimited pile.
For people like Jeff bezos and Mark Zuckerberg they have a completely different mental framework they
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In brief, the reason you blow up a company is the same idea as recycling -- because the value of the items in their current form is less than if you converted them to another form, including the energy to do the conversion.
Imagine two companies:
A. Makes 30 cents for every dollar put in.
B. Makes 10 cents for every dollar put in.
Now which do you invest in? A, all day long of course. Would you sell B to buy more A? If you could and you were "rational" and if the company could scale, yes.
So now imagine:
A. Ma
It never was an "industry". (Score:2)
Narrative podcast is a media format, not an industry. Conflating those two like some silly dimwit is very likely to lose you big amounts of money. QED.
"Serial" was a podcast that helped kicked off the craze. It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike, produced with a fairly low budget, available for free download asynchronously (unlike radio shows), covered a current controversy (which it helped hype up, partly out of self interest in the attention economy) and had enough cliff-
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There is one "problem" with this sort of format though: It takes time to consume, very much like a streaming series. And there is only so much time that shows like this can eat up.
Many people have time during their commutes. I walk for 30-60 minutes per day (got to get those steps in) and that's when I listen to podcasts. Without that activity (the walk or commute), I would not listen to them.
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"Serial"
As in the podcast equivalent of soap operas?
It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike,
You're going to have to withdraw that last remark if you think men* like a weekly dose of psychotics, tragedy and entire families that probably belong in court-ordered rehab.
*Apologies to the LGBTQ community, who seem to love the same tear-jerking tragedies that dependapotami love on As The Stomach Turns.
In other words ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ow! My Balls! has taken over the podcast scene.
I'll take that show over the movie "Ass" that won 8 Oscars...
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You need more electrolytes.
More msmash space filler slop (Score:1)
Why is this "news" somehow important enough to post?
Bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
A podcast I listen to regularly likes pointing out how a one hour NPR podcast has something like 10 people making it. Producers, hosts, executive producers, editors, story consultants, etc... That podcast has two hosts that do everything. Most of the podcasts I listen to only have two or three people producing them. The one "corporate" podcast I listen to has three hosts and one producer.
The whole point of podcasting is that it's lean and efficient. You don't need expensive equipment and a dozen people. The running joke amongst the independent podcasters is that when a company announces a major podcast investment, start keeping an eye out a year or two later as when they liquidate their studios you'll be able to pick up some really nice Neumann vocal microphones for pennies on the dollar.
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That's just the direct cost, there is also massive administrative overhead that is spread across the entire range of shows, At one time it was far more than 10 people/hour on indirect cost and I doubt that is has gotten better since I last figured it out.
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There certainly CAN be a significant difference in quality, when money and effort are put into a podcast. An example is the Duolingo Spanish podcast https://podcast.duolingo.com/s... [duolingo.com]. Early episodes were very well done. True, inspiring stories told by the participants themselves, with alternating Spanish and English to help Spanish learners. But the cost caught up with them, and they started to re-hash old episodes, and dumb them down. I quit listening because they got so bad.
On the other hand, I now listen
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The whole point of podcasting is that it's lean and efficient. You don't need expensive equipment and a dozen people.
That's definitely not "the point of podcasting". That is like saying "The point of online news is to be lean and efficient. You don't need investigative reporters and editors."
Or that the point of YouTube videos is to be cheap and done by a single guy with the camera on his phone. You can put such content on YouTube, but you can also put expensive productions there.
Podcasting is just a medium that you can put whatever content you want in. You can produce cheap content, with just a guy talking whatever comes
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That's definitely not "the point of podcasting". That is like saying "The point of online news is to be lean and efficient. You don't need investigative reporters and editors."
It most certainly is. At the time of it's inception, the only way to distribute audio over the internet was to stream it using shoutcast on a server platform, or one of the expensive commercial streaming platforms by Real, or Microsoft, or Apple.
For a podcast, all you needed was an RSS feed, which any blogging platform could provide, and a place to put mp3 files, which could be provided by the blogging platform, or free storage on Geocities or Yahoo.
You can absolutely spend a ton of money nowadays producing
Makes Sense (Score:2)
It's almost like demand dictates supply and survival for podcasts. Weird.
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Not exactly.
but advertising dollars are flowing to cheaper chat formats rather than resource-intensive narrative productions.
Logically, advertising dollars should flow to where the ears are. With a caveat: Spend your ad dollars in the market most likely to produce more sales per audience member. Critical thinking people who listen to investigative content probably don't make the best suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers.
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This.
and... people don't have enough time to consume all the content produced; plus AI slop is going to generate even more "content." The thoughtless podcasts will be the first an AI can replicate.
Me, I listen while driving a distance... so many people switched to virtual work that companies are downsizing office space. I would think that should cut into listeners...
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It's funny to think some believe advertising doesn't work on them because they're more of a critical thinker. Reality is that it works on everyone, when done properly, and we have piles of science to back that up.
Time and cost to create an investigative podcast is substantially more than just some idiot sitting around BSing about whatever pops into their mind. But as the listener numbers show, people love that stuff. While the true crime stuff did pull listeners, it's now been beaten to death and most of th
we're all bozos on this bus (Score:2)
Has anyone ever come close to Firesign Theater? Or even the old radio programs from the prior decades that inspired it?
I listened to a few narrative podcasts and they all fell in to the same annoying patterns. Kinda like watching Discovery Channel "documentaries" where you learn nothing, leave wishing you had that time back.
I think Nat Geo made the same mistake of letting boobs produce their stupid "documentaries". I tried to watch the one about pirates, but it just kept coming back to a dumb scene they fil
This is typical for ad-backed media. Still sad. (Score:2)
Anytime there's an economic downturn, companies reduce their advertising budget. That includes reducing their own advertising staff and reducing their paid advertising expenses. The result is always cuts in media budgets who primarily bank on advertising revenue for operations.
Some podcasts are already adapting by asking regular listeners to join premium tiers (and the great ones get great buy-in) or moving their podcasts to subscription services like SiriusXM to kept a piece of the subscription revenue.
Sounds like (Score:2)
I don't listen to podcasts but this sounds like what happened in the 00's when the TV networks went all in on reality TV and significantly reduced the amount of scripted content they produced to save money. This is when I got rid of my cable.
The Why? Files (Score:2)
If I understand what TFS is saying, check out The Why? Files for an example of what people like in a show with good production values (it did have a Midjourney rough patch).
"True Crime" seems lame to me but I'm not a chick so that doesn't matter.
"The Telepathy Tapes" is an investigative series that blew up the Internet.
This sounds like the NPR dweebs realized that their product was popular due to scarce distribution. Now distribution is democratized and listeners have choice.