Growing up is hard and often messy.
2016 was the year that the decade-old podcasting industry grew up. How so? It professionalized. Outfits like Gimlet, Midroll, Panoply, Wondery, and to some degree my own company, Audible, are feeling less “startup-y,” and showing signs of maturing into viable media production companies. Notice I didn’t call them “podcasters.” That’ll be part of the problem in 2017 for small and mid-sized podcasters.
As I watch the podcast industry mature, I see parallels with the early music industry. For much of its life, the music industry followed a cycle: Passionate entrepreneurs started independent labels, and some grew successful. Most of those successful indies were bought by corporations and absorbed…but not all. There were some small indie labels that remained small. Those who happily remained small felt that the trade-off balanced in their favor: While they lacked the distribution and marketing muscle of a major label, they were free to call their own shots and decide their own futures. But for the unhappily small…they just feel left out.
The smartest players in the music industry (a small number of people, admittedly) realized they were in the music industry, not the 45 single, LP, CD, or digital download industry. Those who survived did so because they were quickest to acknowledge that they needed to be everywhere. And, ironically, it was often the smaller, scrappier labels who figured that out first.
2017 will be the year that podcasting stratifies into hard layers, the year of distinction between major label and indie label. 2017 will be the point where what divides these two layers will be more relevant than what unites them.
The professionalized podcasters (and I’d lump bigger legacy media orgs like NPR, WNYC, ESPN, and HowStuffWorks in there too) will see a lot of payoff for their efforts this year to produce better metrics and analytics, better discovery pathways, more sophisticated advertising tech, and (this will be the most impactful move) to direct as much listening away from the RSS/iTunes ecosystem as possible and into their own app experience, other platforms, and access points. That’s a smart play for them. When you rely on one distribution channel, your fortunes are inevitably linked to the fortunes of that platform. However, another result is that they will seem less and less like “podcasters.”
What does stratification mean to the little guys? Lately I’ve heard a lot of laments from smaller, independent podcasters that it’s getting really hard to keep up. The strategic struggles of a Midroll or Panoply feel less and less applicable to them. And that’s okay, as long as they feel their independence works in their favor. But I don’t think that will be the norm.
With the big publishers slowly evolving out of the space, what happens to the overall iTunes/RSS-centric podcast traffic? My fear is that the ecosystem we have invested in all these years will start to resemble the vanity publishing marketplace or the guy selling CDs out of the trunk of his car after gigs: a place that’s easy to publish into, but rarely yields a significant audience. Which means we’re just making it harder for our industry’s indies to grow into future hitmakers.
Eric Nuzum is senior vice president for original content development at Audible.
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
David Weigel A test for online speech
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Andrew Haeg The year of listening