Podcasting Predictions For 2015 (Ep11)

Hey guys Ryan here from podcastfast.com and in this episode I want to talk about some of the podcasting predictions that I have for 2015. I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. This is actually the fourth podcast that I have. So I currently run four different podcast so I know a bit about podcasting so here are my predictions of what I think will happen in podcasting in 2015.

My first prediction for podcasting is a bit of a depressing one and that’s that I don’t think there’s going to be any new tech in podcasting at least not any significant new technology breakthroughs. I would love to see some new tech in podcasting something like YouTube but for podcasting however I don’t think that is going to happen. I don’t know if the passion just isn’t there in the tech community and that everyone who podcast is passionate about the content rather than the technology.

But I just can’t see anyone coming out with some new technology for podcasting in 2015. So that means we’re stuck with the standards we’re stuck with iTunes and stitcher radio how are trying to work their way into cards and we’re also stuck with maybe SoundCloud but there’s hardly anyone podcasting on that.

My second prediction is that there’s going to be more storytelling podcasts. With the success of Serial which has been the most downloaded podcast ever or the fastest to get to a million downloads or something like that with the success of them. There’s also the success of another podcast called Startup and there are other podcast called Reply All.These are podcast that have a high production quality but they’re more storytelling sort of podcast. So rather than your standard one person sitting on a microphone trying to give advice which is what I do let’s face it or you’ve got your two people trying to give advice so there’s two people that host a show and talk about it or you’ve also got your interview type shows.

Rather than just having your standard shows like that I think there will be more entrance into the storytelling market obviously with the success of Serial the success of Start Up when you get crowds that are that big then money also comes with that. So I believe people will be pursuing that because it seems that’s what crowds want to hear so we’re going to see more storytelling podcast in 2015 which I think is an exciting thing.

Third thing I think is we’re going to see more media coverage around podcasting. We’ve seen media coverage for sporadically throughout the years. Every time Apple releases a new app or in this case Apple actually put podcasting into ios8 and you couldn’t deleted it there has been new media hype around podcasting and how to make money in podcasting and the success of podcasting and I think podcasting has reached a level now where it’s significant enough in terms of the audience that more media will start to cover it and more people will begin thinking about podcasting and begin recognizing podcasting.

It’s kind of hit that threshold and it seems to be continually growing. Podcasting is a slow-growing market but it doesn’t seem to be going backwards so I think because we are reaching that 30 million users in the US reaching up to 40 50 60 million as we keep going up we’re going to see more media coverage cause it’s a bigger market there’s more audience on there so people will want to talk about that.

The fourth thing is that I think there will be more and more podcasters moving to SoundCloud. I saw this start in 2014 where a couple moved over to SoundCloud but in 2015 I think more and more podcasters will actually begin shifting away from their existing media host and towards SoundCloud. The reason I think people will begin shifting away is because SoundCloud does give them the opportunity to expand into a new audience. There’s also Spreaker out there I don’t know how well they’re doing but I do know that SoundCloud has a large audience there already.

So I believe people will start moving from media host like Lipsin or hosting their own stuff and moving over to SoundCloud in order to get exposure to the other community over there. For example Pat Flynn has the Ask Pat show SoundCloud I just checked the other day he has over 340,000 subscribers just on Soundcloud. So that doesn’t include iTunes it doesn’t include anything like that. So that’s a massive amount of people that’s a huge audience that he’s exposed to. So I think a lot of podcasters will move away from Lipsin away from other media host and move towards SoundCloud even though it does have some issues and it’s not easy to use that potential for excess exposure will move people across.

The fifth thing that I believe will be we’ll see more people trying to fund their podcast and try to make money out of their podcasting using the crowdsourcing or the donations model. And basically people just say to keep this free and to keep us creating this you can support us at wherever it will be. We’ve seen this a lot on YouTube where people are using that. We’ve seen a lot with music artists as well where they say you know I need to raise $30,000 to create an album or I need to raise $1000 per month to pay for the audio equipment and to get these episodes out and so I think we will see people trying to do that. And so rather than people actually trying to create value in it and a real business around it I think we will see people starting to do that and starting to try and crowd-source things.

The sixth thing that I think number 6 is that we’ll start seeing higher frequency podcast. This really blew up when John Lee Dumas from entrepreneur on fire launches daily podcast where he interviews an entrepreneur every single day. Now he was ridiculously successful he currently makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on his podcast and so that has inspired a lot of people to do daily podcast and to get out daily episodes. So I think podcasting is a medium where it’s actually not too hard to do daily episodes. I find myself writing if it daily episodes even video can be difficult doing daily episodes because you have to being front of the camera. But I think podcasting is a medium that is easier to do daily episodes if you have a good structure in place where you can edit your podcast quickly and get stuff done. So I think we’re going to see higher frequency podcast.

And the seventh thing the seventh prediction that I have for 2015 is that we’re also going to see more advertising dollars invested in podcasting. Is there going to be an explosion of advertisements out there? Is there going to be platforms where people can help you advertise you know probably not . I don’t think there’s going to be a huge explosion where it’s going to be really easy for podcasters to get advertisers like it is on YouTube at the moment where you just tick a button and it says monetize.

However I do think we’ll see more ad revenues going into podcast because there’s more audience there, there’s more frequency there, more episodes more consumption. It just makes sense that more ad dollars will go into that. I would love to see someone launch something maybe Apple to launch something that will help people make money through advertising on podcast but I really don’t think that’s going to happen in 2015. I just don’t know if the market is big enough yet but hey I could be surprised.

So there you have 7 different predictions for podcasting in 2015. Thank you guys so much for listening and I hope this has been insightful to you let’s see if these predictions pan out or if they don’t. I’ve done predictions in the past and some of worked out and some haven’t so let’s see how we go. So until next time don’t just podcast, podcast fast.