👂 You Hearing This?

What if you could sit across the table from each person in your audience, and share your message from your heart? You wouldn’t need to outline, write, and edit every word because your heart for your message would shine through. Just like a conversation with a friend, you’d be able to bare your soul without wondering whether or not you were heard. That’s exactly what podcasting makes possible today.

The Rise and Rise of Podcasting

Podcasting, as a form of media and the technology around it, has existed in some form or fashion since 2003, but 2019 was a pivotal year in the rise of podcasting as a mainstream content medium. The US has crossed into saturation territory because 51% of people have now listened to at least one podcast (22% still listen weekly). Internationally, there are now podcasts in 100 different languages.

2019 was the first full year where Google Podcasts has been a standalone app, and Apple is officially sunsetting iTunes and investing heavily into Apple Podcasts as a standalone platform. Google and Apple dominate today’s technology, but they’re not alone in the podcasting rush: Spotify paid $340 million to acquire two podcast startups (and Pandora has podcasts now too).

“Podcasting is the new blogging”

That’s what Seth Godin said at the end of 2018 (the same Seth who has been blogging daily for more than a decade). Seth was there in the early days when blogging was just taking off, and he recognizes the same phenomenon today.

Despite the booming industry around the business of podcasting, there are less than a million active podcasts today—just over seven hundred thousand, compared to half a billion active blogs.

If you have a message to share, now is the time to share it on a podcast.