Triton Digital SVP Daryl Battaglia Knows We’re Still in the Early Days of Podcasting

Tens of thousands of podcasts are relying on Triton Digital to build their audience, maximize revenue, and streamline their day-to-day operations. From technological innovations to providing data on who is streaming your podcast and/or radio broadcast, Senior Vice President of Measurement Products & Strategy Daryl Battaglia plays a pivotal role.

“[I am responsible for] understanding, the profile of the audience, who the listeners are, and helping to create products and provide those insights to the publishers,” Battaglia told Barrett News Media over a Zoom call.

The information Daryl Battaglia provides is key for those who, create and distribute that content to help sell advertising. But it’s not easy, new technologies are making it harder to measure audiences.

“There’s so many different places that you can consume content and so being able to measure all of that you are no longer able to rely on, ‘We’re going to record a sample of 10,000 people that will reflect the population.’ You may only have a few people who were listening and watching one particular piece of content and that’s just not enough to rely on samples.”

Another issue with getting data? Third-party streams. “A lot of the listening comes through third-party platforms. So a lot of that means that these are not registered, logged-in listeners, or telling you who they are. You have some information about where they’re located, what type of device they’re located on, and what IP address are they on, but you can’t fully understand from that data alone.”

Key questions for those gathering data include, “What are the demographics of these listeners? What are the purchase behaviors/shopping behaviors of these listeners? And how many unique listeners are there, within any particular segment of the population?”

Without this data, it’s more difficult to know who you are marketing to and what type of advertisers you need. “Because listening can occur on any third-party platform, [our] measurement has to include different methods to help fill those gaps.”

One of the really good pieces of Battaglia and his team are finding is that audio is growing, in more ways than one. “What we’ve seen across markets is typecasting. The audience is continuing to grow and the number of listeners is continuing to grow. The types of segments of the population that came to podcasting, in particular early, now that’s diversifying, growing, and growing. And so we’re seeing other segments of the population, women, and older listeners, for instance, that are now growing and catching up.”

With the data Battaglia and his team have gathered, he noted listeners for podcasts are, “still younger than the general population. It is also more educated, higher-income people with a lot of purchasing power, which is particularly appealing to advertisers. So it’s not getting older per se, but it’s becoming a medium that appeals to everyone. And so those that weren’t early adopters of podcasting are now catching up.”

Battaglia does have some ways to gain more information on who’s listening but it requires a lot of work.

“Part of what needs to occur with that is to filter it back to only those records that should be counted as legitimate listening. So there’s things like machine traffic, that exist within the data and we use a variety of methods to be able to clean that data. We collect data from a variety of different sources for different plants of ours, and we kind of normalize all that to make it similar and comparable.”

Sometimes the team will input this data into their own or a third-party software product to analyze it better. But the team at Triton Digital has gone above and beyond that creating their own products.

“For instance, with podcasting, we have a demos-plus product to help understand who the audience is for each podcast. We use a combination of that big data that I mentioned previously, along with surveys of podcast listeners that we do help understand them better and we help produce estimates and really know who the audience is for each podcast out there that we measure.”

Today, Triton’s clients include iHeart Audience Network, Salem Media Group, CBS, and 1,800 others who operate in over 80 different countries. Another part of their focus is “making today’s audio better and tomorrow’s audio possible” with technological advances.

“Podcasting has been around technically about 20 years, but it’s still new. And there’s a lot of data, reporting infrastructure, and tech that needs to be created in order to make the marketing work as seamless as possible.”

But what makes the numbers trustworthy?

“A lot of rigor regarding the methodology and the review of the data. The expertise that you develop from working with that data and detail level. Industry standards matter as well,” Battiglia went on to note. “In podcasting, we have the IAB Tech Lab podcast guidelines for which Triton has been audited and certified. That helps for sure. Additionally, transparency regarding how you’re doing [your research]. For instance, we put our methodology, description, and documents to make that clear. [Also] just being consistent with that over time helps to build that trust.”

While Battiglia uses all this tech to help on the back-end of podcasting he doubts we will hear an AI voice coming to the airwaves. “I’m not an expert on AI. I know it’s capable of many things but there is such a uniqueness to some of the great content that gets produced. It’s hard to believe that any sort of machine can do that … There are some other things that maybe only a human can do that are just unique. Things of one individual’s imagination.”

For those of you looking to use your imagination and take your podcast to the next level, Battaglia believes there is no golden rule on when it’s time to monetize your product.

“Some podcasts are better geared to a broad audience base and have the potential for big audiences. Other podcasts may be more specialized and may not be big audiences, but may be different, and important for a select segment of the population. Even those can be monetized with advertising and sponsorships that are directly catered to towards that type of audience.”