Questions about the future of podcasting

James Cridland, the Editor at Podnews, hosted the session and
introduced the speakers one by one: Tine Godsk Hansen is responsible
for external commissioning at Danish Radio, Hannah Russell is the
Founder of Mags Creative, Bryan Barletta is a Partner at Sounds
Profitable, and Matt Deegan is the Creative Director at Folder Media.

Then the group got into the questions…

Is there space for new formats? Hannah thinks so. She was able to
experiment with her podcasting because she did not need to be too
commercial, especially at the beginning. This allowed for the
production team to build new formats and try things out.

Has the branded market changed quickly enough? Yes, says Bryan.
Measurement has shifted as the audience has moved. The content
propositions have developed. And attribution has improved.

What is happening in the podcast awards space? Matt says that the
Australian market is full of Instagram podcasts, made by people who
look at podcasting in a different way to how the rest of the industry
does.

What’s happening with podcast subscriptions? Hannah is experimenting
with subscriptions because she thinks it’s part of the future ecology
of the business, but Matt says it’s a bit of a “mess” right now,
especially for podcast makers.

What are podcasting missing in terms of monetisation? A lot, says
Bryan. He’s not sure that the industry has totally bought into the
products and technology which we have at our disposal. The language is
a turn-off too, with words like “programatic” and “dynamic ads” in
particular.

What are the apps of the future? Hannah thinks that listeners will
need to keep three apps on their phone for the next few years. People
will have exclusives on different platforms so we need to keep our
options open, certainly for the moment.