You cannot escape the podcast boom. But the very word is applied to everything from well-produced, finely targeted (and even profitable) audio to, well, the very opposite. There are some huge audiences but also many podcasts scarcely justifying their existence.
There are brilliant podcasts for mass markets and others for passionate niche audiences. The agenda-setting audio briefings of daily newspapers like the New York Times (The Daily) and The Guardian (Today in Focus) have built substantial regular audiences, reportedly accounting for some 10% of digital downloads. The Economist has been producing audio editions for 15 years, while others like the Washington Post and Financial Times offer “Listen to this article” on much of the content, either through AI or human voiceover. Many of these news brands will have been captivated by research showing that consumers are more likely to pay for digital audio than for online news.
Inevitably, there are blurred lines between podcasts, radio programmes, and audio streaming. That’s why the real significance of the podcasting boom – for media companies – may be the overall growth of “spoken word audio”. A recent US report** highlighted the transformation in the eight years since 2014:
- 45% increase in the ‘spoken word’ share of audio listening
- 214% increase in share of ‘spoken word audio’ among Gen Z (13-24)
- Listeners now spend more time with ‘spoken word audio’ than with music
With some 62% of the US population having listened to a podcast in the last year and 46% listening every day to ‘spoken word audio’, these findings imply that many people – especially among younger age groups – are turning from reading to the ‘spoken word’.
That’s a straightforward justification for the explosion of podcasts and other audio but media companies should be careful. Just two decades after newspapers everywhere rushed to pump their content free onto the new fangled internet and then spent years trying to claw it back, they should experiment with care.
Take note of one warning. Spotify – which has never quite managed to make a profit from its dominant music streaming – now aims to become the platform that will monetise podcasting. If it succeeds, Spotify will presumably become a media company, the new Facebook-style threat to publishers and information providers.
The opportunity and threat of audio has motivated UK startup Curio to strike alliances with publishers, including The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, Wired, Monocle, Scientific American, Vox and Fast Company.
It is essentially an audio journalism app which picks articles from more than 50 publications large and small, and gets them professionally narrated into audio, much like podcasts. Curio is free of ads and sponsorship, and all content is available for offline listening. Much of the content is evergreen. There are playlists on topics ranging from Hackers to Privacy, Stoicism to Creativity. The site has thousands of “hand-picked” audio articles with new 5-6 new items added daily.
A Netflix-like subscription enables users to listen to all the articles on the app. They can download the app for free and listen to 10 tracks before they’re prompted to subscribe. Average subs prices are $80 for an audience that is mostly in the UK, Germany and North America.
It’s nicely intuitive with a menu bar offering Top Stories and a selection of recently added tracks, read by voiceover artist, ranging from a few minutes to a full half-hour. While listening, users can go back to the list and find what they want to listen to next.
The audio platform which airily claims to be “changing the way people connect with journalism” is the brainchild of its CEO, former BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and ex solicitor Srikant Chakravarti. Absorbed by the growth in audio, they searched for ways of providing distinctive content, before launching Curio in London in 2017 and in North America two years later.
It is among several longform-to-audio apps launched in recent years, including Audm, in the US, and the Ireland-based Noa (“News over Audio”). The fact that Audm was bought by the New York Times for $8.6m which also paid $25m for the producers of the bestselling podcast “Serial”, emphasises the strategic importance of audio to the increasingly international news brand. It is also a competitive marker for Curio.
One early investor in Curio has been the founder of Future Plc, Chris Anderson, whose visionary launch of TED Talks almost coincided with the first podcasts some 16 years ago. He is enthusiastic about “audio publishing” and Curio: “The keys to me are the difference between reading a researched magazine piece vs following a to-and-fro on Twitter. In the former, each minute of your time corresponds to perhaps 100 minutes of brain time contributed by the author. And the whole thing is structured to share knowledge effectively. The latter is hit and miss. It’s the same with listening to podcasts. It’s more intimate, but it is likely that you learn a lot less per minute of listening. So if you believe – as I do – that audio opens up a whole new spectrum of attention and can turn every former chore into an enjoyable learning experience, then there should be a big role for more deeply researched audio. And that’s effectively what Curio provides. Beyond that, I’m impressed by the team, and the fact that they’re growing organically. I go walking around the park for 50 minutes each morning and about half of that time is typically listening to Curio… My selection of tech/ media/ climate/ entrepreneurship regularly turns up interesting articles I’d never otherwise have heard. But, for others, their curated playlists are the hook.”
In its first five years, Curio has raised some £10m from VCs and from investors like Anderson. The economics are closely guarded but we estimate that the annual operating costs of the 25-person company are something like £1.5m. The costs are largely fixed with 50% being accounted for by tech/ production and perhaps 15% by the fixed fees paid to publishers.
We estimate Curio has an average of 60-70k subs worldwide and a 40% churn rate. It may, therefore, have annualised revenue of some £600-700k. In 2022, therefore, the cash ‘burn’ rate may be at least £800k. Aggregate losses during 2017-21 had totalled some £7m. That’s why it is believed Curio may be seeking to raise a further £3-4m in order to fund the company through to its targeted 100k subscriptions and, presumably, profit in 2-3 years.
Juicy stats show that half of Curio subscribers are aged 25-34, are not podcast listeners, and that 35% access the app every day with average session times of 30 minutes (some 3-4 articles). Prospective investors will be regaled with details of a strategy they might recognise. It echoes Netflix whose origin as a streamer of old TV programmes and movies was superceded by huge investment in brand-defining original content. Curio is (more or less) hoping to go the same way.
The ‘grow your own’ content strategy began in earnest with “What do I know?!”, an exclusive fortnightly audio show by actor and philanthropist Gillian Anderson, exploring “human stories, social challenges, sexual liberation, and phenomenal women”. Separately, Curio also produces a daily commentary “Informed” and is building what the CEO describes as “a huge pipeline of original content”, perhaps on the way to a service that will be 50% exclusive.
Despite the relatively low cost of audio (compared with video) the stakes are high – whichever way you judge the 16 loss-making years of streaming both by Spotify and Netflix. While Curio’s changing content strategy seems to have been validated by the streaming companies, the exploding growth of audio may yet change the whole market.
The major publishers – like those which, for example, collaborate with the Readly and Magzter all-you-read magazine services – support Curio variously because of: reach, engagement (data), and revenue. But Curio is currently a ‘no risk’ experimental activity for publishers. If (and when) audio becomes a mainstream activity, their willingness to support a third party service may depend much more on the financial risk-reward.
The real issue, though, is the future of audio as a primary (not ancillary) medium for journalism. The NPR research in the US underlines the likelihood of audio becoming at least as important as text, especially for young people. “Audio publishing” may, therefore, eventually comprise the following:
- Media company sites with audio ‘channels’ alongside text and video
- Pureplay branded audio sites for mass market and specialist audiences
- Podcast / audio platforms providing a wide range of products and services
You sense that the fast-growing audio market (like so many others) may eventually divide between the specialist providers (as no.2 above) and large-scale operators (nos 1 and 3) as already indicated by the New York Times and Spotify. Ultimately, of course, the future of the tech-strong Curio will depend on its ability to grow a stable, loyal subscription base; 100k would be a start. The race is on.
**The Spoken Word Audio Report 2022, by NPR and Edison Research
