Whodunnit? Serial host Sarah Koenig and producer Dana Chivvis in the studio. The first season, which revisited the 16-year-old murder of a Maryland teenager, was a global hit, from the US to India. (Elise Bergerson)
Two-thousand fourteen was a very good year for the podcast. It saw the creation of five podcast networks; an estimated 15 percent of Americans listened to podcasts each month (up from 9 percent in 2008); and Serial, the most popular podcast ever, debuted in October and drew over a million listeners per episode; that same month, Ira Glass went on The Tonight Show to explain podcasting to the nation. This resurgence of a genre that had never quite lived up to the initial hype has been described as a “renaissance” and a “golden age.” More important, the economics of podcasting have begun to make sense. Low production costs, super-high audience engagement, and the seamless fit with an increasingly mobile, on-demand media world mean that advertisers love podcasts–and are willing to pay higher rates for access to what they offer. New York reported that for the top podcasts, advertisers pay between $25 and $45 cpm (the cost of reaching a thousand listeners), compared with $1-$18 for typical radio and $5-$20 for network TV. Is this the future of radio? Stay tuned.
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.