‘Qualify the context’: Publishers see success with podcasts created to deepen coronavirus crisis coverage

By Sara Guaglione

Publishers found audiences flocking to coverage of the pandemic in 2020 and are now leaning into that story’s next chapter as vaccines roll out, creating coronavirus-focused podcasts to capture and monetize new audiences and dive deeper into the growing audio space.

Industry predictions suggest there’s a lot of opportunity: eMarketer forecasts U.S. podcast ad spending will surpass $1 billion this year. Another report, from consulting firm Altman Solon, finds global monthly podcast listeners are expected to grow 20% per year between 2020 and 2023, and reach nearly 2 billion by 2023.

Like other publishers, The Economist saw a surge in traffic to its coronavirus coverage. Traffic was 60% higher on average on content around this topic compared to all other online articles from the publisher in 2020, according to the company.

The interest spurred The Economist to expand its coverage of the pandemic into audio — the publisher launched a weekly podcast about the vaccine rollout, called “The Jab from Economist Radio,” on Feb. 15. The podcast secured regional sponsors including Cigna for APAC and Fujifilm for EMEA.

“COVID is the most consequential and urgent story of the day, so we want to surround it with journalism in all formats,” said The Economist president Bob Cohn.

The Economist has produced podcasts since 2006, but did not launch its first daily series and flagship show “The Intelligence” until 2019. The company has grown its portfolio of podcasts to six, which attracts 3 million unique listens and 25 million downloads monthly, Cohn said.

Podcast-based revenue at The Economist is up 50% year over year. “There is a growing podcast line in our advertising business,” Cohn said. “Our podcasts are free… and we believe that they contribute to overall awareness and top of the funnel and drive subscriptions to the main Economist at the same time.” He called podcasts a “growing sector” with “organic consumer interest,” leading the company to “put some editorial and product muscle behind it.”

Most publishers view podcasts as an avenue to expand their brand and reach different audiences, with the hope that those listeners will become paying customers to their membership programs. That’s in addition to the advertising growth many are seeing from the medium.

There was a “huge uptick” in coronavirus-related podcasts around the beginning of the pandemic, according to Dave Zohrob, co-founder and CEO of Chartable, a podcast analytics service. Along with newsletters, live blogs and interactive maps, publishers embraced podcasting with a new sense of urgency to chase an uptick in traffic brought in by coronavirus coverage.

When “Coronavirus Daily” launched in March, it was NPR’s fastest growing podcast to date, for example, according to the publisher.

Other publishers also saw success with podcasts last year. Bloomberg’s overall podcast revenue was up 33% in 2020 over 2019, according to the company. Its narrative podcast “Prognosis” previously covered the future of healthcare, but became a daily show focused on the pandemic in late March 2020. Though it reduced its production schedule to three times a week at the end of last …read more

Source:: Digiday