Triton Digital's 2023 Podcast Report; Podfest; and Spotify's new strategy

Daryl Battaglia: 18:33
Triton Digital has been in the digital audio and podcast space for over 15 years. We offer services across streaming audio as well as podcasting. In podcasting, we have a hosting platform called On Me Studio to help you manage and distribute your content. We have a full ad tech stack to help publishers monetize their advertising, and we have measurement and analytic services to better understand the audience for podcasts and that's where I come in is leading our measurement strategy in products.

James Cridland: 19:08
So you released the US podcast report for 2023. That's got data from On Me Studio in it, from Triton Podcast Metrics, from Demos, plus Some really good data in there. What were the big findings from your point of view?

Daryl Battaglia: 19:23
The biggest finding, I think always, is podcast growing and what we found is it's grown each of the last two years. We computed to a 12% growth in monthly podcast listeners over the last two years and what we saw was that came across all segments of the population, different age groups, male, female. We really saw a broadening of the audience while podcasting over indexes for a younger audience, for a little bit more male audience, we actually saw more growth from the over 55 group in the United States and more growth from females. So we're seeing a broadening of the audience and we're really seeing that podcasting appeals to everyone and it, I think, really is exciting for the future that the podcast audience can continue to grow and there's really no ceiling that it can. Obviously there's all different types of podcasts and it can appeal to all different types of people.

James Cridland: 20:26
Indeed, it's super exciting. I wonder whether your report said anything about YouTube. It's certainly all of the talk of the podcast industry over the last year.

Daryl Battaglia: 20:37
It did. We did a pretty in-depth comparison of YouTube and Apple podcasts and Spotify as well. What we saw is that YouTube is the number one platform that people say they use the most to consume podcasts. 33.5% of monthly podcast listeners said they use YouTube the most, and that has been growing. 47% of their listeners said they started consuming podcasts in the last year, so a lot of the new listeners are coming from them. But we also saw a lot of differences in the demographics of the audience for YouTube as compared to Apple podcasts and Spotify.

James Cridland: 21:24
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because and this is data from demos plus and some really interesting data about the demographics of the various platforms so Spotify listeners being younger, Apple listeners being richer, YouTube listeners being more male and a bit less money what should we learn from that for podcasting?

Daryl Battaglia: 21:46
I think it helps with distribution strategies. I think it helps to understand who your audience is and help to inform your content strategies and help to inform your advertising strategies as well, to understand more about not only who your listeners are as a whole, which demos plus helps to do, but to understand some of the differences amongst platforms.

James Cridland: 22:13
Yeah, and I guess it also shows some of the benefits of Triton podcast metrics in that the data that you get from Spotify is only data of Spotify listeners and similarly, the data that you get from Apple is only from Apple listeners and they're not necessarily the same types of people, are they?

Daryl Battaglia: 22:30
No, they're not. So, as you mentioned YouTube, really all of those platforms are younger than the general population. However, we saw that Spotify was the youngest, whereas YouTube was a little bit older. We saw Apple podcasts was more female, while YouTube was more male. Differences in income as well. Apple podcast audience on average was at a higher income. So there are certainly differences amongst those platforms which were interesting to learn more about.

James Cridland: 23:06
Yeah, so fascinating bits of data. The other two bits that I saw which I found interesting Firstly, the top shows by purchase intent. So, and again I'm getting that this is from demos plus as well. So if, for example, you want to reach shows listened to by people who are interested in switching their wireless provider, which seems very niche thing, then apparently Wow in the world, or fantasy football today are two big shows for that. This is really focused information. Isn't it really useful for for advertisers as well?

Daryl Battaglia: 23:45
Right. With our podcast metrics demos plus solution, we're able to understand the profile of the audience across podcasts of all sizes. So aging gender, other demographic insights, their purchase behaviors and intent, their political affiliation, their other media usage, and so there's a wide variety of purchase intent data and different audience segments are important for different advertisers. So if you are a wireless provider, you definitely want to advertising shows that will do a good job of reaching people who are in the market to switch wireless providers. And in the report, first of all, we highlighted a few examples of different genres at the genre level, but within our our ranker of the top 100 shows for the year, we also highlighted for different audience segments and different purchase intents and demographics, what were the top three shows that over index the most for those segments or would reach that audience most efficiently?

James Cridland: 24:53
Yeah, and I think particularly helpful for an election year, which of course it is. I wonder if anybody spotted this yet in the US. Particularly useful in terms of that, because being able to focus on specific age ranges and also what, which ways people are going to vote as well. Absolutely.

Daryl Battaglia: 25:15
It's not surprising, of course, that different types of podcasts that have political content are going to be geared towards a certain political affiliation. That part's not surprising, but it provides that insight for podcasts of all genres and definitely helps with political candidates and their advertising campaigns and determining what podcasts could be a fit for them.

James Cridland: 25:43
Yeah, and I particularly. You know it's always nice seeing data where you can go OK, that makes perfect sense. For example, the podcast listens to buy people with the most amount of household income. Podcasts like Planet Money, or how I built this with Guy Raz. I mean that that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? It's really nice seeing actually data that you go. Yeah, that that's absolutely right.

Daryl Battaglia: 26:08
Right. I mean, even if they know that this is the case because of the subject matter of their podcast, have actual data with actual numbers. That is third party proof of the case and helps quantify. It is a big help for them as they try and find advertisers or partners for their shows.

James Cridland: 26:26
So what do you think that the US podcast report tells the podcast industry? What should we take away from that?

Daryl Battaglia: 26:35
Better insight into who the audience is and how that differs across genres, across shows, across platforms, with download measurement. That data doesn't you mentioned. Like sure, like Spotify can provide it for their audience to a certain extent maybe not to the same level of depth, but so I think that's been a gap in the past, for the industry is really understanding who the audience is and how it differs across the whole, the whole landscape, and so that's really a big part of it is to shed insight into that, share insights into that, and a lot of it is more at the aggregate level, but we provide this type of data to our clients at the individual show level or for any aggregation of shows as well.

James Cridland: 27:21
So the report is free. Where can people get hold of it?

Daryl Battaglia: 27:24
They can go to TritonRankers.com. On there you can see our podcast rankers, which are monthly in every country. But there's a link below under the resource section to be able to download the report. It's about 30 plus pages of all different insights that hopefully people will find really useful, and I know the team here has put a lot of work into it, so we're excited to put it out there.

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To listen to the full interview, visit: https://weekly.podnews.net/1538779/14462859-triton-digital-s-2023-podcast-report-podfest-and-spotify-s-new-strategy