Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will

Nearly each survey of the podcast manufacture successful 2024 agrees connected 1 point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises successful popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners similar to devour this way), advertisement spending increases (estimated to apical $4 cardinal worldwide), and listenership steadily grows (8 percent year-over-year), it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes rather unserious splendor—that continually draws radical in.

The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that person go fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare similar I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more connected that 1 later) person besides recovered tremendous followings. Other chat-casts, similar Club Shay Shay, look to tribunal contention with each release. “Katt Williams, delight adjacent the portal,” @nuffsaidny precocious joked connected X, alluding to the comedian’s guest quality from January erstwhile helium prophetically proclaimed of 2024: “All lies volition beryllium exposed.”

“That appointment—that relationship—is everything,” Eric Eddings, vice president of audio astatine Kevin Hart’s media institution Hartbeat, says of the enslaved chat-casts are capable to found with listeners.

In 2014, on with Brittany Luse, Eddings launched For Colored Nerds, a play gabfest astir popular culture, race, and existent events (full disclosure: I appeared connected an occurrence successful 2017). After Nerds, Eddings went to Gimlet Media, wherever helium co-anchored The Nod (also with Luse) and produced for the shows Undone and Habitat, earlier moving to SiriusXM. Today, Eddings steers podcast improvement for Hartbeat. What was existent of the mean erstwhile helium started out, helium tells me, is inactive existent today. In a caller video call, we discussed the authorities of the manufacture and its sometimes analyzable evolutions.

JASON PARHAM: Why person chat-casts gotten truthful popular?

ERIC EDDINGS: There are a fewer reasons. Just to beryllium consecutive up, a batch of the companies wanted to fig retired ways to put little successful programming. Narrative podcasts are precise costly to make. They necessitate a ample upfront investment, and past you effort to fig retired however to marque them arsenic palmy arsenic imaginable if they resonate with audiences. And a batch of companies person had trouble bringing those types of projects to marketplace fixed the struggles of the amusement media industry.

So it’s a wealth issue?

Podcasts with chat arsenic a absorption are a small spot easier to trial out, enactment successful the market, and to make each week. You've seen a batch of a crook towards that. Those are the macro influences. But that besides abbreviated changes a small spot of the conversation.

How so?

Even though podcasting has been retired for a while, you've besides seen a batch much groups of radical travel to podcasts successful caller ways. There’s much familiarity with the medium. You've seen comedians, you've seen influencers. There was a inclination aboriginal successful the pandemic wherever folks were like, “Ah, we’ve got to commencement a podcast.” Whereas present I deliberation radical are having ideas oregon uncovering radical they privation to collaborate with and spot podcasting arsenic the spot to research that. It’s a truly flexible medium. Collaboration allows for experimentation. And that benignant of experimentation is truthful overmuch easier successful a chat discourse due to the fact that the speech is the point.