By 2024, podcasting revenue from ads is projected to cross $4 billion.
Despite the fact that the podcasting industry is going through a turbulent period, there’s one silver lining: In 2023, you can now get paid in Bitcoin to listen to podcasts.
Although it's not clear if everyone wants their rewards program to remunerate them in volatile assets, it does open a new frontier in passive income generation for fans of podcasts.
Podcast platform Fountain has teamed up with the popular "play-to-earn Bitcoin" games company ZEBEDEE to offer listeners Bitcoin rewards for the first hour of podcast listening. The Fountain team even created its own set list of podcast recommendations for those who might not have podcasts already queued up on their iPhone.
Moreover, Fountain and ZEBEDEE say that listeners can reward podcast creators too, optionally paying for programs by the minute and allowing content creators to advertise to them.
“This type of value-for-value exchange is the future of content creation,” said Fountain’s CEO Oscar Merry.
“We’re supporting a new type of business model and economic activity,” added Ben Cousens, ZEBEDEE’s chief strategy officer.
“A few years from now, we’ll look back at when we paid subscriptions for content platforms that aren’t related to how much we actually use those platforms, and laugh at how basic and inefficient it was,” Merry said.
By 2024, podcasting revenue from ads is projected to cross $4 billion. However, the broader podcasting industry is being tested by high-profile budget cuts and a raft of layoffs. In January, Spotify said it would fire approximately 6% of its workers, or around 600 employees, just a few months after laying off key parts of its workforce already. Although Spotify's chief Daniel Ek pledged to take “full accountability" for a series of bad decisions leading up to the departures, the company is not alone in slashing staff to increase profits. Other podcasting companies that have gone lean are the Tom Brady-backed Religion of Sports, which puts out “Now for Tomorrow With Deepak Chopra,” and Vox Media and Pushkin Industries. In this environments, other podcasting powerhouses like Amazon, SiriusXM, NPR and Spotify have all reduced their podcasting budgets.
In Spotify's case, the company spent over a $1 billion on adtech, podcast publishers and studios, along with scooping up exclusive partnerships with household names Kim Kardashian and Joe Rogan. Although it grew into a behemoth podcasting company hosting 5 million podcasts on its platform –with meteoric growth and a 30x uptick in podcast consumption – the company is recalibrating and looking for projects that offer short-term profitability. But many podcast consumers have grown accustomed to getting audio for free.
“The name of the game has been to ‘do less with less,’” echoed an NPR producer. The public broadcasting company recently froze all new hires in a cost-saving measure.
“Podcasting has gotten to a point of growth and maturity, but it’s still evolving and growing,” Elli Dimitroulakos, head of ad innovation for podcast platform Acast, told Marketing Drive. “It’s not going away, it’s carving its own path and it’s trying to break out from underneath audio and stand on its own, because it’s outperforming every medium, including influencer.”