Apple have just announced it’s bringing native video podcasting into Apple Podcasts. This isn’t just another feature update, it’s Apple acknowledging something that more and more creators have been saying: their audiences want video. And platforms that don’t serve it risk not being seen as true content destinations.

Apple Podcasts has actually had video since the beginning, there’s even been points where they encouraged podcasts to do it - around 2013 if I can remember right! It didn’t last long. This time Apple is embedding video deep into its podcast experience rather than distributing it as a side-effect of RSS. By embracing HLS video, the same adaptive streaming technology behind Apple’s video services, Apple is staking a claim that video podcasts should feel as seamless and integrated as audio has always been. They talk about users being able to switch between audio and video within the app, flip to full horizontal display, and download videos for offline use.

There’s a clear strategic motive here. Creators have already been making their shows available in video form on platforms like YouTube and Spotify because that’s where audiences, particularly new and younger ones, are spending time and attention. Whilst audio-first creators may grumble, video isn’t just complementary; it’s a core part of how people discover and engage with podcasting now.

But there’s a deeper shift under the surface.

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Apple Is Now Part of the Ad Stack

Apple doesn’t seem to be charging creators or hosting providers to distribute video. That part stays very much in the open RSS tradition. But it does seem to be charging participating ad networks an impression-based fee for serving dynamic video ads inside HLS video. That is new territory for Apple Podcasts.

This changes the economic architecture:

• Video podcasts can now include dynamically inserted video ads, including host-read spots.

• Apple becomes part of the monetary flow, not just the distribution layer.

• Ad networks like Acast, ART19, Omny Studio and Simplecast are the early launch partners.

Does that mean monetisation for video podcasts is no longer just about where you host your RSS and who sells your audio inventory? Apple seems to now be part of the delivery and billing chain for video ad impressions. Is that the first step towards Apple taking more of a platform-level share of podcast revenue.

That’s a substantive evolution from how podcast advertising has worked historically, where the network stitches ads into audio and the app simply downloads or streams that file. Even Spotify has largely eschewed this with its partner programme, concentrating on ad-free listening and sharing subscription revenue with creators. With HLS, the ad decisioning and delivery is happening at the point of playback, which is where Apple sits.

Syncing Ads Across Formats Isn’t Trivial

One question Apple hasn’t fully answered is how this works in practice when a listener switches between audio and video formats of the same episode.

If someone is listening to an audio episode with an ad break at 15 minutes, then chooses to watch from the same point, how does the ad system behave?

• A unified platform - where one ad call determines both audio and video creatives in lockstep?

• Separate pipelines where audio and video ad logic run independently - risking mismatched or repeated impressions?

• Video-first display with audio fallback where video drives the break and audio follows?

Different hosting partners and networks may implement different approaches, and that’s before you consider host-read sponsorships baked into audio that have no video equivalent. Those complexities are not trivial, and they go to the heart of what “seamless” will actually mean for creators and advertisers.

This isn’t just technical hair-splitting. It goes to the economics of audience behaviour. Switching formats might be a user convenience, but if that switch triggers a new ad break that feels like a fresh impression, advertisers care. So do podcasters, because earnings hinge on those settled definitions of an “impression”.

Update: James Cridland suggests that it will follow the Spotify model of taking the audio from the video.

Platform Dynamics Matter

It’s also worth stepping back and recognising what Apple’s move does to content distribution strategies.

A few years ago, the conversation I was having with creators was whether you even needed video or whether podcasting should remain about audio conversations. That tension between defending audio’s unique strengths and acknowledging the reality of video consumption was the theme of my posts about video this time last year.

Today, few serious publishers think of podcasting as purely audio. Yes, audio is portable, intimate and special. But creators who want growth and relevance are already thinking in terms of multi-platform, mixed-format strategies.

Apple’s move formalises the move to video for podcasting with the core consumption apps - Spotify, YouTube and Apple - now all putting video front and centre.

But it doesn’t automatically solve the discovery problem that video podcasts still face inside Apple Podcasts. Search, recommendation and trending behaviour on YouTube is a very different engine to what we see in most audio podcast apps. Apple will need to lean into that behind the scenes if video podcasts are to feel native rather than bolted on.

What This Means for Creators

For anyone making a long-form talk show or interview series, this is a positive evolution. For your Apple audience - one feed, one show page, one analytics set. You won’t have to maintain separate audio and video listings just to get discoverability and usage data that makes sense.

But monetisation logic now gets more interesting.

• Audio CPMs (and subscriptions) remain vital.

• Video CPMs tend to be higher, but they also need different creative and production rigour.

• Mid-roll host reads, dynamic spots and video overlays all coexist now — and synchronising them across formats will require editorial and technical thought.

In the earlier phases of the shift to video I wrote about how creators needed to adapt workflows for platforms like YouTube and Spotify, retooling their content for a video audience rather than simply republishing audio. That remains true.

For Creators, of course, this does add even more complexity. You’ve got a videos ads model on Apple Podcasts, an ad-free video partner programme on Spotify and a separately architected ad network on YouTube. You also may have an Apple Podcasts subscription service (one tier, audio only, no data sharing) alongside a multi-tier subscription offer on Patreon, or a multi-platform content offer on Substack. It doesn’t make it easy to explain to your audience how to consume your stuff.

Perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel, Omny and Acast are two hosting/ad providers who are part of this announcement as well as the one Spotify made at the beginning of the year.

Acast’s move into video spans not only the Spotify announcement and this Apple one, but they also announced an ‘MCN’ for their podcast partners on YouTube. This allows them to sell inventory on YouTube in their partners’ podcast channels. If they combine video ad sales and distribution across Apple and YouTube as well as something on Spotify, that’s potentially quite powerful. But it does require the scaling of a video product for their CMS and a new video advertising project. A busy time for their team.

For Triton - the operators of Omny Studio - their business needs to evolve too. They’re slightly different to Acast. They provide a content management system for podcasters, but they also provide the plumbing to sell your own advertising and to connect to third party ad networks. It’s a more business to business operation. They’ll have to work to align their pipes to deliver the content and ads to the destinations their customers needs. A tough task for their product people too.

Outside of these two, it remains even more of a mess, and complex for podcasters to navigate.

Isn’t it time Apple, Spotify and YouTube worked together for the good of their content providers?

Update: Stephen Robles has a video walk through here:

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Every quarter, the UK radio ratings come out from trade body RAJAR and we’ve just had the data for the final quarter of 2025. There’s quite a lot of red ink with many stations and groups seeing declines.

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The UK market is pretty consolidated. Looking at total hours of listening - where we have around a billion - the three main players have the vast majority, with the rest fighting over the final 12%.

The dominance of the main players makes some of the concerns over ratings look fairly minor. When we compare the sales operations of Global and Bauer, looking at the hours from this quarter and the previous year, we can see that whilst there’s some variance it’s not going to change the fundamentals of their businesses. Indeed the breadth of stations means that if someone leaves one station, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll end up at another station from the same group.

I’m always intrigued when comparing the nature of our industry with that of a comparator like Australia. If you want a deep dive, the excellent Game Changers Radio and the new Quarter Hour podcasts will keep you up-to-date on those markets.

On Game Changers there’s been an interesting discussion about whether UK ex-pat Christian O’Connell’s new breakfast show is truly national as he’s on FM in Sydney and Melbourne, whilst ‘only’ on DAB+ in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. This is a conversation we would never have here, for the radio groups, it’s the network sell that’s the focus. Broadcasting Capital in London has advantages, but every listener across the UK is treated the same from a national revenue perspective. Indeed it’s hard to buy Capital’s historic analogue locations on their own, with impacts wrapped into the Capital brand spanning Anthems, Chill and Dance too.

Similarly the importance of winning ‘London’ or ‘Bristol’ has almost entirely vanished. This would be an anathema to our antipodean colleagues where City-based breakfast winners are a core part of their radio conversation.

If you do take a snapshot of London looking at market share, the top 20 stations are as follows. The majority of the top stations have stayed stable, though interesting to see BBC 6Music as the 8th biggest station ahead of 5Live.

One station that would have done well in the past was Kiss - regularly top 10. Now, without it’s FM licence or much marketing, it’s 42nd in my share list - doing just 628k hours. 20 years ago (Q4/2024) it did 8.1m!

Our consolidated sector has seen the nationalisation of much of the commercial sector’s programming often with only our nations - Scotland and Wales being blessed with some local programming content (Northern Ireland has been almost totally left alone). To take our Kiss example that’s now a national digital-only station with 1.2m listeners and 5.4m hours and its network does 3.4m listeners and 16.4m hours. Maybe London just doesn’t matter any more?

The local execution of national brands like Heart, Capital, Hits and Greatest Hits is mainly limited to news, weather, travel and the local ads now. Part regulatory, part strategic its still seen as valuable ways to enhance the output. Indeed, for Bauer, their Hits and Greatest Hits networks often appear on local digital multiplexes with local news, weather and travel even without any regulatory committments.

The transition to the nationwide structure has seen the local operations for the groups significantly reduced with less people and less buildings. This has made the local sales operation less of a focus than has historically been the case.

Some people argue that this previous local revenue is still for the taking. I think there’s definitely opportunities but the difference from the 90s commercial radio heyday is stark. Back then there were so few options for that big local car dealer, that the local radio station was guaranteed significant spend. The rise in self service digital advertising from Meta and Google does mean that radio monopoly has vanished.

It’s not something I can confirm, but someone told me that Bauer now make more money from their premium-rate contest Make Me A Winner, than they do from local advertising.

Bauer were one of the last to nationalise what is their Hits Radio England stations. It’s had a dramatic effect. Whilst there’s been a drop in reach from 3.8m to 3.1m, the real change is the hours. With a reduction of a quarter from 20m to 15m.

This is, to a certain degree, masked by the success of other parts of the network as well as the new spin off services. Whilst the drop is still visible it has less of an impact when seen (and sold) as a network.

Bauer’s networks took a bit of a hit across the board. Year on year, Hits is down 8.1% in hours and 5.4% in reach, GHR has seen a drop of 8.6% reach and 2.4% hours, Absolute’s down 4.6% hours and 3.1% reach whilst Kiss’ hours are up 4.3%, but reach is down 9.6%. Magic is seeing some green shoots with the network up 14.1% reach and 3.1% hours.

BBC

The BBC’s main pop stations haven’t had a great time of it this quarter, looking at the reach, Radio 1’s hovering at the 7m mark, Radio 2’s lost a million over the year and 6Music (nationally) has softened too.

Thanks again to radio experts - a sound perspective, for sponsoring this post and also thanks to Hallett Arendt who provide me with Octagon, the perfect way to analyse your radio data!

• There’s more detail about more stations from Adam Bowie here

• Radio Today breaks down all the data and the spin!

AOB

On The Media Club, out Friday, I’m up in Glasgow speaking to the team behind STV Radio and I’m also catching up with Adam Bowie to talk RAJAR. Follow the podcast to get it in your feed.

If you enjoy these posts, do check out The Media Club substack. It’s based on my weekly podcast and as well as a post about each episode, every Monday I write Briefed, which runs through what ALL the other media podcasts have been talking about. I think it’s really good, and you can subscribe for free!

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Thanks to Hallett Arendt’s Octagon software for giving me the data to help write this post.

Most people looking at the Heart Network’s latest RAJAR, out today, would see the drop in reach and assume the network is under pressure - it’s down 4.4% year on year, falling from 9.79 million to 9.36 million. That lines up with the mid-Q1 schedule changes, when many local presenters were replaced by more networked output from London.

But the data points towards a more nuanced picture. The decline is likely to have come from light listeners – those occasional tune-ins built around habit or local familiarity rather than deep loyalty. Fans of particular presenters may have followed them elsewhere or drifted to other stations that still ticks the local box.

What’s important is that the core audience has stayed put. While reach has fallen, hours have held steady, meaning the total amount of listening delivered to advertisers is broadly unchanged. That’s the figure that really matters to Global, as commercial radio mainly sells on hours rather than weekly reach.

So while the headline number looks softer, the commercial story is solid. Heart has fewer listeners overall but they are collectively spending the same amount of time with the brand - alongside a significant cost saving for the team at Leicester Square.

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Taken together, the broader Heart Brand – which combines the main Heart Network with its digital spin-offs – remains steady. It reaches 12.8 million listeners each week, down 1.6% year on year, while total listening has increased 1.8% to 82.4 million hours. The Heart Network continues to account for most of that listening, delivering 59.3 million hours, or around 72% of the brand’s total. The spin-offs collectively contribute 23 million hours, expanding the brand’s overall footprint across digital platforms.

Within those extensions, Heart 80s remains the largest contributor, generating 6.3 million hours, followed by Heart Dance with 4.8 million and Heart 90s with 3.3 million. Of these, Heart Dance is the only service showing growth, with hours up 17% year on year and reach up 7%. The remaining stations – Heart 00s, Heart 70s, Heart Love, Heart Musicals and Heart 10s – are smaller, together providing a modest share of listening. Both Heart 70s and Heart 00s have seen reductions in reach and hours, while the newer services are still establishing their scale.

A quick mention of Heart 80s breakfast host Simon Beale, who’s recently been off-air because of a heart attack. He mentioned on Insta that the on-brand health issue wasn’t lost on him. Get well soon Simon and congratulations on your ratings being up quarter on quarter!

Heart’s total brand number has been bigger than BBC Radio 2 for three consecutive quarters (though a little mean to compare the network and eight spin offs with the one BBC station). Both now reach 12.8 million listeners each week, with Heart fewer than a thousand ahead of R2. It’s a narrow margin, yet it marks a sustained period where a commercial network has held the biggest weekly audience in UK radio. Radio 2 still leads comfortably on hours, delivering 132.7 million compared with 82.4 million for Heart Brand, so it continues to dominate in depth of listening and share.

Across Radio 2’s weekday schedule, this quarter Vernon Kay has edged up from 6.58 million to 6.61 million, while Sara Cox has risen from 5.53 million to 5.66 million. Those gains have helped offset softer results elsewhere: Scott Mills slipped from 6.22 million to 6.16 million, Jeremy Vine moved from 5.82 million to 5.71 million and Trevor Nelson dropped from 5.26 million to 5.20 million. All dayparts are down year on year, but modestly, suggesting the disruption caused by schedule changes and the GHR emergence may now be behind them.

Speaking of GHR, it hasn’t had a great year with the main network audience falling to 6.23 million, down from 7.43 million. Listening hours are also lower at 56.7 million, compared with 64 million this time last year. That continues the easing seen across recent surveys, with most weekday dayparts showing declines both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter.

There are, however, some new additions to the network. The recently launched GHR 60s, 70s and 80s stations are now contributing meaningful listening, together accounting for around 6 million hours. When combined with the main network, the GHR Brand figure shows total hours holding steady year-on-year (–0.2%) and reach down by only 4%, compared with a 16% fall for the core network alone. That suggests the new services are helping to retain overall listening across the brand and supporting reach, even if they’re not yet generating major net growth.

Looking at the main schedule and comparing year on year, Breakfast reaches 2.9 million, down from 3.3 million a year ago. Ken Bruce stands at 3.45 million (down from 4m), while Kate Thornton delivers 3.01 million (down from 3.4m). Simon Mayo reaches 2.4 million (down from 2.8m), and Jackie Brambles sits at 493k (down from 526k).

At the older end Boom Radio’s reach has fallen back to 688k from 711k last quarter (and 700k year on year). It’s hours have dropped from the 11m outlier last quarter to a still healthy 9m (significantly up on 7.7m a year ago). They’ve also launched another station Boom Light - a station targeted even older! It’s debuted with 105k listeners and nearly a million hours. Its reach profile is 89.9% 65+ compared with Boom’s mere 78.9%.

• There’s more detail about more stations from Adam Bowie here

• Radio Today breaks down all the data and the spin!

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AOB

If you enjoy these posts, do check out The Media Club substack. It’s based on my weekly podcast and as well as a post about each episode, every Monday I write Briefed, which runs through what ALL the other media podcasts have been talking about. I think it’s really good, and you can subscribe for free!

The Media Club with Matt Deegan

Your essential guide to TV, radio and the press, presented by Matt Deegan. New episodes weekly, previously The Media Podcast.

There’s lots of chatter about Inception Point AI and how they're churning out 3,000 podcast episodes a week of AI Slop (how dare you called it AI Slop you luddites they shout back).

There are plenty of links to the material, and it’s dreadful, of course. Their model is to make it so cheap and surround it with ads that even a small amount of listening per episode is fine. It’s the audio equivalent of those content farms running Google AdSense. All the visits are fly-bys, and it’s the advertisers who lose out. Listeners will clearly realise it’s rubbish.

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Really, it’s a self-contained universe of screwing over ad providers. I imagine that means Spreaker, which seems to host it, will soon stop once their advertisers start to complain. I also imagine Apple and Spotify will remove it from their catalogues. The last thing they want is an arms race rewarding those who pump more and more rubbish into their apps.

So I expect it to be gone within the month. This storm will blow over.

But what I find really odd is that you could use AI to do a much better job with just a little care. I sat here, and in 30 minutes I used AI to create a pretty good first draft of a script for a 30-minute podcast episode about a person. I had it analyse similar podcast transcripts, work out style and substance, test some options, and iterate.

The script is actually just the output of the work I put in. The next person I pick, using similar prompts and again working on the output, would probably take about 10 minutes.

I haven’t done the AI-voiced bit, though that tech is improving. If I avoided the cheapest one on the market, I bet I could find something pretty good.

And this is the thing that raises far more questions than the half-arsed AI slop generators above. This is what’s coming, and it’s going to be much harder to dismiss. These sorts of shows will fill a gap for some listeners. If you currently make something similar manually (for want of a better phrase), it will probably cause you problems.

I’m sure your product will be better, but how much better? 50%? 10%? How much value (cash, listeners?) can you squeeze from that difference? This is the true challenge of AI. It’s happily going to create material that works for a decent number of people. It will take some of the time people spend reading, listening, or watching. The challenge will be doing the things that AI can’t generate, or later replicate.

Successful creative endeavour is going to be half using AI tools to drastically change the model of content creation and half doing the things that are exceptionally human.

I’m amazed at the sophistication you can get out of AI if you prompt and iterate. My biggest surprise about the Inception Point AI crowd is what a poor job they’ve done with it.

AOB

My podcast’s back, The Media Club. All MD and no AI. A fun, profane episode, was out on Friday. Go listen. Or watch!

We’re also trying out a new thing. Every Monday we’re emailing out a summary of all of the media podcasts out there. I’m calling it Briefed. Go have a look and sign-up if you fancy it. This does use some AI!

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Yesterday, Ofcom published its annual research into the nation’s media habits. Its core message, as it was in their earlier Transmission Critical report, was the effect YouTube’s been having on consumers - and therefore broadcasters too. Amongst their data, was the fact that 20% of children aged 4 to 15 head to the YouTube app as soon as they turn their TV on.

Changing consumer behaviour doesn’t just affect TV, the nation’s widening audio habits will impact traditional linear radio too. In fact, it already has.

You often hear that “young people don’t listen to the radio”. That is very provably false. Today’s RAJAR figures show that 75% of 10 to 18s listen to the radio each week, on average consuming over an hour a day. I think that, in today’s world, that’s pretty remarkable. However, that’s not to say there aren’t some serious warning lights flashing.

If you flash back 20 years ago, 91.4% of 10 to 18s were listening to the radio. It was 2.5m more than the 5.1m today (some down to the radio, some down to population changes). But if you look at the average amount of listening per listener, it renders those demo changes moot.

In Q2/2005 all radio listening for 10 to 18s had an average hours of 14.7. Today in Q2/2025 it’s 8.1 - about half.

Some say not to worry and that people grow into radio.

Four years ago, I looked at how average hours changes over time. I worked out that the amount you listened to the radio when you were 15 stays the same through the rest of your life.

I was interested to look again with the new data.

If we take someone who’s 30 to 38 today, their average hours today are 15.7. If we flash back 20 years when they were 10 to 18 it was 14.7. That’s pretty close.

If we take someone who is 50 to 58 today, their average hours are 24.5, when they were 30 to 38 it was 22.7. Again pretty close.

Commercial radio makes its money based on hours of listening. The less there are, the less money they make. You can already see some of this in today’s data. 15 to 24s average hours show a similar story to my 10 to 18s. It’s 10.3. If those youngsters coming through continue to stick at 8, when they become 25 to 34s then that demos hours will drop 40% (it’s currently 14.1) and as they go to 35 to 44s it’ll be 45% of the currently delivered 17.8.

Demographic and listening habit changes are hitting some stations hard already. BBC Radio 1 had 3.08m 10 to 18s tuning in in 2005, now it’s less than a third - 927k. Even if you strip out the population change, their reach of 10 to 18s in 2005 was 36.9%. Now it’s just 13.7%. They listen on average for 3.4 hours now vs 6.1 20 years ago.

The chart below shows Capital FM in London and the proportion of hours they get from each demographic. 20 years ago the biggest were 25-34s. But there are fewer of them now, and they listen to the radio less. So now the central demo is 35 to 44s with 45 to 54s not far behind.

It’s not just the demographics, the product is being shifted older.

Yesterday in the 1pm hour Capital played 15 songs, with just 5 of the tracks released this year and a further 3 from 2024. You would have also heard Avril Lavigne’s Complicated (2002, that’s 23 years old) and Justin Bieber’s Beauty and the Beat (2012, just 13 years old).

Back on the same day in 2010, Capital played 13 songs in the hour. 10 were from 2010 and the other 3 were from 2009.

No Avril Lavigne song appeared on Capital’s top 5000 airplay chart in 2010. This year, Complicated’s the 149th most played track, whilst Sk8r Boy is at 140 and I’m With You at 309.

I don’t blame Capital for going where the hours are. It’s been pretty successful for them. My worry for them and the other commercial radio groups is that they aren’t really doing anything to reach 10 to 18s particularly and less and less for 15 to 24s. Following the money today just guarantees more of a problem later on.

If radio doesn’t create and support teenagers and young listeners with audio products today, then it’s hard not to think they’re sowing the seeds of their later destruction.

Even at the BBCm their new launches Radio 1 Anthems and Radio 1 Dance will likely super-server 25 to 34s. Plus they wanted to launch a 55 plus station! If anyone should be doing the very hard and difficult work of reaching young listeners it should be the BBC.

Kids TV has seen investment drop significantly from commercial operators (only last week Sky Kids stopped commissioning new material), teenage TV has disappeared from the screens and provision of youth audio has been steadily dropping. I can’t see the BBC or commercial radio even bothering to make a teenage podcast. They have all given up.

Media operators can’t grumble about the YouTube threat and behaviour shifts of younger audience when they’ve clearly abandoned making any content for them.

Total Hours

Back to the numbers… Across all the Capital stations they now deliver 48.9m hours, the Heart brand 82.8m hours and Smooth 50.3m hours. Global as a whole do 282m hours a week.

Over at Bauer, looking at the networks, Absolute’s on 34.1m, GHR’s on 65.9m, Hits on 45.8m, Kiss on 15.7m and Magic on 18.5m. Bauer overall are delivering 227m hours a week.

Both Global and Bauer’s total numbers are supported by other partners - a whole host of stations for Bauer and Communicorp stations for Global.

For Bauer though, one station is providing real benefit - and it’s someone else’s - Boom Radio. This quarter they delivered a stonking 11.1m hours. This is more than the whole of the Virgin Radio Network (9.3m) and pretty close to the main Magic station which delivers 11.3 and Gold with 11.6m

If anything, Boom’s success shows the power of average hours, they’re now delivering 15.7 per listener and for 55 plusses it’s 17.8. They’re also slightly insulated from the average hours trouble of the current 10 to 18s by about 50 years.

BBC

A quick look at the BBC and the reach for their national popular music stations have continued to face declines over the last year. They have been hit with an inability to launch new stations, whilst their competition went launch crazy.

Radio 2 at 12.6m is their lowest reach figure in over 20 years. Now, it still makes them the biggest single station in the country whilst Heart needs nine stations reach figures combined to just pip them with 13.0m listeners.

If you’re after some more details on the numbers rather than a Matt rant - then Adam Bowie’s rounded them up and Radio Today’s got all the headlines.

If you’re keen to analyse RAJAR data, I highly recommend Octagon from Hallett Arendt. Find out more on their website.

AOB

The Media Club podcast is on holiday at the moment. We’ll be back with an episode from the Edinburgh TV Festival at the end of August. In the meantime I caught up with Ofcom’s broadcasting boss to talk about consumer behaviour changes and want it means for broadcaster. Have a listen or watch!

p.s. You can tell the picture atop this blog post is AI - firstly it’s young people listening to the radio - and secondly, did you spot the random arm?

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A double day for radio news as the winners of the UK’s radio awards - the ARIAS - coincide with the release of Q1/25 of the radio ratings. Both are covered on my podcast - The Media Club - with a bumper episode out later today.

Congratulations to BBC Radio 3 for being Station of the Year, Forth One for winning Best Local Radio Station and Goalhanger for becoming Audio Brand of the Year.

The UK radio industry is in a unique position as radio sectors go. It’s a very consolidated marketplace, with the ‘big three’ - the BBC, Bauer and Global now accounting for 86.9% of the UK radio market. It’s also incredibly multi-platform too. 73.3% of radio is now listened to ‘digitally’ - with 42.1% being through DAB and 28.5% being streamed - both much bigger than analogue’s 26.7% share of the market.

But the nature of the sector makes me think a lot about how to measure radio success today.

I’m very much struck listening to Melbourne’s Radio Wars - an excellent podcast that looks at Australian radio, with a focus on a breakfast battle in Melbourne. It shows how local shows are competing against a beamed in national show - that of Kyle & Jackie O. This is with a backdrop of their main radio groups moving towards much more national programming, but a seeming over-reliance on FM (and AM) signals. For a market that’s so creatively ahead, it seems strategically and structurally to have one foot in the past.

The idea of a battle for a single city’s ratings is a discussion that’s long gone here in the UK. Even the idea of winning the London breakfast battle seems a bygone concept as our London breakfast shows are now often the basis for national operations.

For the UK commercial radio groups, it’s the ‘network’ totals that are more important than the station ones. And networks aren’t just the same station in different places, it’s the collection of spin-offs that orbit the hero brand. These networks are sold to advertisers. You’re not buying Heart, you’re buying the Heart Network, with impacts delivered on Heart Musicals and 80s as well as what’s going out on 106.2 in London.

The battle between Global and Bauer is over who can deliver the most hours to the agencies and be must-have on schedules. A decline in the local hours because of networking, is often more than made up in new audiences on spin-offs, whilst at the same time banking significant cost savings from closing buildings and employing fewer people.

The net result is very little changes to total audiences - 87% of the country listen to some form of live every week for an average of 20 hours. Additionally the profitability of UK radio groups, seems pretty strong.

The spin-off stations have supercharged commercial radio against the BBC, moving commercial radio’s share of all listening to 54.9% and its share of 15 to 44s to 67.4%. Even for 45+, traditionally a BBC heartland, commercial radio and the BBC are now neck and neck, both at 49.3%.

The issue with the spin-off stations is whether they’re just a sugar hit? Can the networks grow the relevance of some of these individual parts to make material differences to their network (and not just to off-set declines in the heritage parts).

The chart below shows this quarter’s total hours alongside last quarter’s and a year ago for some of the main networks. There’s a lot of flat stations and some with precipitous declines. Now this is part of the problem of increased competition. You need to work harder to maintain your audience, let alone grow it. Also, some demos (the young) are harder to deal with than others.

The growth around Global’s Heart has been impressive, as is Capital’s performance, Smooth has seen solid progress too. It’s early days for Classic’s new spin-offs to reenforce its brand whilst LBC and Radio X are broadly going in the right direction.

Bauer’s GHR is up and Absolute is flat-ish, the rest has seen significant hours erosion. This survey is before GHR 70s and 80s and Hits 90s and 00s hit the airwaves - it will be interesting to see what affect they have. For Hits the question is whether it will offset any churn following the de-localisation of their historic FM network at roughly the same time.

Over at News UK, record performance for talkSPORT and talkSPORT2 has helped drive the ‘talk’ network, offsetting underperformance from Talk Radio.

The Virgin Radio network finishes 12 months under 10m hours, seeing a large year on year decline. Indeed its total hours are now just a smidgen ahead of independent oldies station Boom Radio which generated a phenomenal 9.5m hours. I would imagine the cost per listener difference between Virgin and Boom is significant.

For networks that are under-performing I think Boom is a good lesson. It has an audience focus, creative programmers and is hungry for success. It also spends a decent proportion of its income on marketing - which is relatively invisible if you’re under 65. It doesn’t RAJAR its two spin-offs, I’m interested to see what it does with them now that the challenge it faced from Radio 2 Extra has been seen off.

I think there is a question whether there are too many spin offs and not enough programmers. Are the stations a little threadbare to deliver the next wave of audience growth? Has a lack of marketing and investment harmed some of the parent brands, making it even more difficult to (re)-grow audiences? And where are the ideas that can drive new station formats that can generate 10m hours? Why’s that being left to the independents.

Global and Bauer have done a good job of grabbing the low hanging fruit, whilst definitely catering for some unmet audience need. They’ve been able to do this whilst the BBC has been somewhat stymied from competing in the same space. We’ll see if Radio 1 Anthems, Dance and Radio 3 Unwind redress some of the balance. However for the battling commercial groups - the real opportunity is surely trying to ‘do a Boom’ - devising something new that has real resonance (and hours) rather that just try to defend heritage brands with more of the same.

If you’re after a more detailed line-by-line interrogation of the figures, Adam Bowie’s done a great job here. Check out Radio Today’s coverage here.

The excellent Octagon from Hallett Arendt helps me process RAJAR numbers - they can help you too!

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RAJAR, UK radio’s audience figures are out, and as always it’s great to see a snapshot of how stations are performing, but also it’s good to note the changes in listener behaviour.

Whether you’re in radio, music or podcasting, we can never forget that we’re in the audiences business. Public service, commercial or doing it for fun - our focus surely has to be on delivering value for the people that consume our and our colleagues’ work.

UK radio has been on a long march to consolidation in ownership alongside an explosion in new stations driven by the growth in listening to DAB Digital Radio and streaming. Analogue listening (AM/FM) now only accounts for 27.8% of radio’s consumption here. Indeed, streaming radio is neck and neck with analogue (with a 27.0% share). Listening on a DAB Digital Radio leads the pack, 35.9m radio listeners tune in that way, and it accounts for 42.7% of listening.

This change in behaviour has led commercial radio’s big groups - Bauer and Global - to really jump on station expansion, particularly spin-offs from their existing brands. This quarter sees at least 10 new stations publish figures for the first time, including Greatest Hits Radio 60s (with 386k listeners) and Heart Love (201k).

This has had a significant affect on the BBC. In the last ten years, the BBC has gone from reaching 65% of the UK through radio to 55%, its share of listening has been similarly affected dropping from 54% to 44%. The corporation is trying to fight back, pushing to launch spin-offs like Radio 1 Anthems, Radio 1 Dance, Radio 3 Unwind and a Radio 2 oldies station on DAB. They’re currently stuck in the regulatory quagmire.

What’s interesting with the BBC proposals is they’ve identified that to be successful with audiences who don’t use the BBC, they have to ape commercial radio’s model - less speech and more niched opportunities.

They’re right in their analysis, though I’m not sure it’s the best argument for a public broadcaster.

Radio isn’t a one-size fits all medium. People listen for lots of different reasons, in different places and catering for many different need states. Historically, the market was made up of music-intensive stations (like Absolute 80s), music and chat services (eg Radio 2 and local radio) and all speech stations (like Radio 4).

I think we’ve definitely seen a switch to much more focused music products - Heart (best ever reach of 10m), Smooth (2nd best ever numbers at 6.5m), GHR (biggest commercial station by hours) all have very low speech content (and have replaced stations that were a little more chatty) and at the same time there’s been an explosion in speech services - the expansion of LBC (in this book, Nick Ferrari celebrated his highest ever numbers at 1.5m), Times Radio (up 23% this quarter to 604k listeners), talkRADIO etc. Trying to be successful and broad is more difficult as there’s often a station to scratch a particular itch right now. We no longer need to pick ‘the least worst option’.

BBC Radio 2 remains the country’s most popular station with 13.6m listeners (up year on year and quarter on quarter), but someway below the 15.5m it was doing ten years ago. BBC Radio 1 is down to 7.5m (from 8.1m last quarter, and slightly up year it on year) though it was doing 10.5m ten years ago.

There’s often a cry about younger listeners abandoning radio, well since RAJAR started up again post-pandemic (Q3/21), reach for 15 to 19s is up from 2.1m to 2.4m and 20 to 24s from 3.7m to 3.8m. Even if that just tracks with population increases - it’s not bad. How much are they listening? Well, that’s not bad either. For 15 to 19s, the amount’s grown from 23.6m hours to 24.6m for the older 20 to 24s - it’s gone down from 44.3m to 40.5m, but if I looked at last quarter, that was 46.6m - so it’s basically static.

The challenge for younger listeners isn’t radio’s decline - it’s that they’re pulled lots of different ways. Algorithmically-led music taste (driven by apps like TikTok) means trying to be everything to everyone is very difficult.

Commercial network Kiss is clearly grappling with these changes too. It’s main station (shorn of it’s FM frequencies in London and beyond) drops to 1.08m listeners (down from 1.6m quarter on quarter and 2.3m year on year). This sounds pretty dire until you see that its new Kiss Dance spin off racked up 720k listeners, alongside 190k for Fresh, 2.1m for Kisstory and 530k for the new Kisstory RnB. I think it’s a fascinating challenge to think of what the Kiss ‘brand’ is now.

The consolidation of stations has been aided by government regulation, with the latest Media Act removing local programming requirements. Global have chosen to create versions of Heart, Smooth and Capital for England, Scotland and Wales resulting in the loss of many jobs.

If you look at Heart, all but one of the regions grew the audience of their local drive-time shows, year on year. This was not an under-performing bunch of people. Indeed Heart South’s Rich Clarke added 120k hours in a 6.2m TSA and Heart West’s Ben Atkinson added 160k hours in a 4m TSA. Meanwhile in London there was just 62k growth for their drivetime show in a 12.7m TSA.

The cost savings from the local teams will be significant, but shutting buildings will save even more money. According to Radio Today, Global’s sites at Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Wrexham, Milton Keynes and Fareham will all close.

The Heart Network - the main Heart made up of all of these regions/nations generates 58m hours, its spin-off stations like Heart 80s and Heart Musicals collectively generate 23.2m hours - with significantly less investment and resource. These spin-offs may currently generate half the hours of the Network, but I’d imagine at significantly less than half the cost.

The BBC has an excellent opportunity to benefit from the removal of lots of local brands, but its efforts at BBC Local Radio have not been particularly successful. A small glimmer of hope for them this quarter is their ‘Local Radio in England’ total has, year on year, plateaued at 4.8m. In the last 10 years its audience has dropped 30% and the hours of listening its delivered are now down 40%. It has a lot to try and recover.

Australia

It’s interesting to compare the UK with Australia. They’re going through a similar transformation with many regional and capital city stations now under the Hits or Triple M banners, Nova in all the capital cities as they’ve always been and ARN looking at bringing together their capital city stations under a KIIS or Gold banner.

ARN recently signed a ten year $20m/year deal (that’s £10m/year in UK money) with their Sydney breakfast talent Kyle and Jackie O. They added them to Melbourne with a view to taking them to the other capital cities. Melbourne has not gone particularly well (do check out the excellent Melbourne Radio Wars podcast to keep track of the shenanigans), putting the move to any others on hold.

One of the challenges for ARN is that KIIS (and some differently named stations in the same KIIS network) when executed locally have a different music mix and feel. The lack of harmonisation and extreme nature of K&J content (that Sydney are used to and no one else is) has made it difficult for ARN to make their strategy work. And it has to. They’re on the line for $200m that they’ve promised to K&J.

Had this been the UK, the option would have been to create a new station for the show on DAB outside of Sydney (similar to what we did with Chris Moyles on Radio X). Australian DAB is actually pretty successful, but it lacks the focus and understanding of the radio groups. The importance of their historic analogue stations has left the groups unable to be as fleet of foot as their UK counterparts. Even today they could add the Sydney KIIS as ‘KIIS’ outside of Melbourne and Brisbane and start to build a nationwide K&J home. It need not get in the way of future changes to FM stations, but it would at least give them a run up.

Back to the UK

With previously local networks, spin-offs and new stations it can be hard to see who’s the biggest. If we look at stations/networks over 1m listeners, here’s the table based on total number of listeners (that’s reach or cume):

It makes BBC Radio 2 the biggest station, and Heart the biggest commercial radio station.

If you look at listening (hours or share) then BBC Radio 2 is still the biggest station, and Greatest Hits Radio is the biggest commercial station.

Radio 1, despite its bad book, is bigger than Capital, Capital Dance and Capital Xtra are bigger than Kiss, though Kisstory is bigger than all of them. Heart 80s is the number one eighties station, as it’s bigger than Absolute 80s, meanwhile Radio X and Absolute Radio are neck and neck.

If you want more RAJAR chat (AND WHO DOESN’T!), then Adam Bowie (who also writes a blog post about RAJAR) is joining me on The Media Club podcast this week. It’s out on Friday, so why not follow it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts in preparation. Also joining us on the show is audio fan, and PR supremo, Megan Carver.

For more RAJAR detail, Radio Today is also a good place to look. And, if you’ve been forwarded this by a friend or colleague, why not subscribe!

Thanks to Hallett Arendt who’s excellent Octagon software allows me to analyse RAJAR data so quickly.

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All this week I’ve been posting (part 1, part 2, part 3) about why podcasters, particularly those producing long-form conversations, should think about their podcasts as shows and deliver them in the places and platforms that today’s consumers want to get them. Of course that should be in Spotify or Apple Podcasts, but shows should also be retooled to work on video platforms like YouTube.

As I talked about yesterday, retooling your production process for video can be a challenge, but it also opens up lots of questions about monetisation too. The platforms are very much marching to the beat of their own drum and not yours. So, what do you need to think about?

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Well, everyone’s mileage varies, depending on what type of business model they have. If you don’t have dynamically inserted ads, or the revenue from it is pretty small, then you’re pretty fortunate. If you do, everything gets more complicated.

One of the real benefits of podcasting has been the evolving ad model. If you use a network like Acast, Audioboom or DAX, when you upload your show you mark where you want the ads to go, alongside deciding if you want there to be pre-rolls (before your content) and post-rolls (after it). Taking all of this together, shows normally have at least three ad breaks, with around three ads in each break.

As a content creator you don’t have to worry about the ads, the network sells the ads for you (alongside other podcasts) and dynamically inserts them into your show. Each listener could get a unique set of ads depending on where they are and when they download the show. The networks tend to sell a mix of spot-ads - 30 second commercials - and live reads (sometimes called sponsorships). Live reads are where the host reads out a sell for a sponsor. Normally now, whether a spot ad or a live read, the message is inserted dynamically into the episode for the listener.

The podcast app is generally quite dumb. It looks at an RSS feed for each show and that includes a link to (usually) an MP3 file on a server. It merely goes to that link and downloads the file. The clever bit is done on your network’s server. When the file is requested, the network stitches together your episode with the relevant ads and sends it back to the app for you to listen to. This is often called ‘pass-thru’ as the app gets a new file each time for each user. It doesn’t store it on its own servers as that would mean everyone would get the same mix of ads as the first time it was downloaded, also if that happened, your network wouldn’t know how many downloads there were and how to charge the advertisers.

In the early years, a few apps, including Spotify for a while, didn’t do pass thru and content creators caused enough of a stink for them all to give in. Often their reasons were good ones, they perhaps wanted to give a better experience by streaming files from their own servers rather than third party ones. But anyway the practice fizzled out. This meant that anyone listening to your show on any app got dynamic ads and a podcaster could earn some money.

Some shows are popular on all podcast apps, some are more popular on specific ones. Spotify, for example, tends to do better with younger shows and Apple with older ones. However, generally, about 70% of a show’s listening comes from Apple or Spotify with the remaining coming from apps like Pocketcasts, Overcast, Castbox or Amazon Music.

Google’s foray into podcasting most recently was with Google Podcasts, a very good, simple, Android app. Last year it entered the Google Graveyard as the platform wanted to push podcast listening to its YouTube Music app. At the same time it wanted to make what I’ll call Normal YouTube, ie the video one, a home for podcasting more generally.

YouTube has always had success with big podcasters, particularly those who started on the platform. Audio-only podcasters comprise a large number of creators often making long-form material every week. They’re a perfect target for YouTube. That’s exactly the type of material they would like, in video form. They also have an established ad network in YouTube Ads that can monetise that video content.

One of its challenges is YouTube Music and Normal YouTube are quite different products that use the same catalogue as material. They decided to treat podcasts in a similar way to music. Content owners are encouraged to upload their material, audio only with an image is fine, though they’d rather you put full video on, and just like music, they added some special metadata to signal to them that you are a podcast. On a simple level this is so they can put podcast search alongside music search.

The main thing YouTube wants you to do is replicate your RSS feed on their platform. You can do this two ways, the first is you upload your episode as a video file. This could be a full video experience or just the audio with a static image. You then put it in a special podcast playlist. You can do this manually or there’s an automated option.

The automated option takes your RSS feed and when YouTube sees you have a new episode it converts it to a video, with a static image, and adds it to a podcast playlist.

The second option is easy, but the least useful. Normal YouTube’s content discovery algorithms use a ranking of the likelihood a viewer will watch some content. It uses all the signals it has ranging from the thumbnail click thru percentage, to watch time to decide what it promotes. A thumbnail based on a static episode image, a less engaging title and then a video with no, er video, is unlikely to give an episode enough points to be promoted.

However, that’s not to say it’s a pointless exercise, you’re still available in search, and for people who’ve subscribed to your channel’s feeds. For people that know you and want your content, or for those who maybe have subscribed in the YouTube Music app, it’s a way to deliver on the promise “get us wherever you get your podcasts”.

The New York Times’ The Daily uploads most of its videos with static images with not great thumbnails and they do about 10k of views a day. Now bear in mind they’re one of the world’s biggest podcasts. Where they did a regular episode, about the Presidential Transition and Musk, in full video (though still with a poor thumbnail) it did 50k. YouTube, and its users, like full video.

One of the challenges with YouTube are its advertising rules. It does not permit any ad products that it sells itself. So for podcasters you can’t ‘burn in’ a 30 second spot ad (as they sell those) but you can do a sponsor-style live-read. When you add your RSS feed (for auto importing) it instructs you not to do it if your feed has dynamic ads in. If you ignored this and pasted the feed in any way, YouTube would go off and grab it, with your dynamic ads, and then convert it into a video. However, the video wouldn’t have pass-thru. It would have literally taken a single episode with whatever was in it and then provided that to all users in video form.

So we’re at our first quandary. If you’re someone who makes money from the dynamic ads, your listeners on YouTube won’t get them, so as a default any YouTube views won’t be monetised. If you have 1,000 subscribers at 4,000 hours of watch time (over a year) then you can join YouTube’s ad programme, which will give you a RPM of between £1 and £4 per view. This is likely less than the CPM from your podcast network. However you might have higher views, they might do a better job of filling the ad spots - it’s hard to know as it depends very much on your channel.

Your podcast network may also have some rules about whether you can put the content on YouTube in the first place.

Potentially you may move a higher paying listener from the podcast to a lower paying listener on YouTube. But then again you may bring in a new audience on YouTube and make some new money. I think it’s more likely to be the latter, but that’s hard to know.

If you do go down the YouTube route, to maximise your chance of success, you may need to replicate the strategies successful channels use. This tends to be more single topic content, with engaging thumbnails and titles and good quality, well-produced video. To do well you may need to rethink the structure of your content and decide whether that will run across both YouTube and podcast, or whether you create differentiated versions.

The opportunities on YouTube are significant, but they do require some thought. Auto-importing your podcast feed and hoping for the best, whilst at least getting your content into their system, the chances of it being particularly organically successful on Normal YouTube is fairly slim.

Meanwhile over at Spotify they’re also very keen to get you uploading video for your show.

At the moment you add your RSS feed to Spotify Creators for your audio show and it lists your podcast in their directory, respecting pass-thru for your audio ads. To add video, once it’s seen you have a new episode it will list it in Spotify Creators, you then select the option to upload an MP4. It then processes it pretty quickly and the video then appears on your podcast channel. When a user hits play they get the video version, or they can minimise that and get the audio version - great! Well…

At the point you upload the video version, Spotify stops using the audio on your regular RSS feed and instead takes the audio from your video. It does this partly so that people can flick between the audio and video versions. If it didn’t it might find it hard to match the two. However, by doing this it means it no longer takes the RSS audio version with your dynamic ads, so no more audio ad revenue from Spotify.

So your decision to upload is whether you think it’s more important to deliver a video version to Spotify’s users, or more important to get the revenue from your dynamic ads.

If you don’t make much money from the ads, or don’t have them, the decision is obviously much easier. All being equal - why wouldn’t you give users the options of having both video and audio? But clearly the money, particularly for larger shows, would be quite the thing to give up.

Spotify themselves have just announced a new partner programme. If you have 10,000 streamed hours on Spotify in a month and at least 2,000 unique listeners and are in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, then you can join. This will give you 50% of the revenue of any ads sold plus a yet-to-be-defined income from Spotify’s premium customers based on how much they stream from your shows.

It’s much more akin to YouTube’s partnership system than the traditional audio ad network one. There is a catch though, you need to host your show with Spotify (or its enterprise platform Megaphone).

So your choice is either stay with your current network, and decide whether or not to offer video for free and lose the ad money (or stick as an audio-only show). Or move to Spotify and get money from traditional podcast ads on other platforms, managed by Spotify alongside getting video-specific money from Spotify for this new partner programme.

If I was making an ad-funded podcast that had both audio and video, I would be open to this option. But my core questions would be:

1. Whether Spotify could match the audio ad money my current network was providing (for all the people listening on Apple Podcasts etc). In other words, how good were their audio CPMs?

2. What’s the additional revenue I’m likely to generate from the new video partner programme on Spotify

3. And would one and two be more than I was getting at the moment

If I chose to do the Spotify thing, I’d probably be choosing to do the YouTube thing too, especially as I’d already done the really hard bit of making my show in video form.

If the numbers add up, and I’m sure it’ll vary person to person, network to network, this could be a good thing. My show would be available in audio and video in all the main places where people want to get it, and I’d have two sets of ad income - one from Spotify and one from YouTube.

If the numbers don’t really add up - let’s say you’re getting a really good CPM from your audio only ad network, then you're in a bit of limbo. You should probably still do YouTube, as I would imagine the revenue is mainly additional, but for Spotify, if you’ve got a decent amount of audio listeners, and no way to monetise the video, then you’re probably a bit stuck.

The Spotify Partner Programme is less than a week old, so it’s too early to jump to many conclusions. Is this the final version of it? What will their CPMs be like? What will users think about video on Spotify, will they use it? Of course, it opens up lots of questions for ad networks like Acast and Audioboom, they can only sell ads to apps that take their ad-injected feeds.

In the old pass thru world, it was easy for podcast creators, they made one audio show and let the ad network do the selling. This is quite different to the web, where websites have ad networks competing for ad slots in constantly running dynamic auctions.

In the new world you can choose to keep your podcast audio only, it will be easy, and your ad network will continue to do the heavy lifting, but will you find your growth limited on a audio-only platform that faces more competition for consumer’s time from the video platforms?

Alternatively you may re-tool your show to be audio and video and take your luck by splitting your ad inventory a couple of different ways? You may have more potential to grow, but it requires more work and effort and you are somewhat at the mercy of what Spotify and YouTube do in the future.

I wish there were some easy answers. Sadly, there are not. What should you do? Well it depends! Personally, whilst the monetisation options start to shake out, I would work to re-tool your show to work in both video and audio. If you’ve got a limited budget, what can you do step-by-step to get there? Similarly how do you build out your other platforms, things like social and web/email. Your best chances will come from having flexibility. The best chance of success will come from delivering the right content on the right platform to the right consumers - you can never go wrong by doing the right thing for them.

That’s it from me. This is the 4th part of a series, the other parts are here: part 1, part 2, part 3. Do subscribe to get more posts about the podcast, streaming and radio world.

If you want to follow my podcast, The Media Club, all the details are on its website.

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Working alongside the rest of the team at my marketing agency Podcast Discovery, the past year has seen us talk to lots of creators, from big media companies and podcast-first operations to individual talent. Video, both short-form and long-form has been a constant topic.

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Some built strong video operations from the start, others have added it to what they do, whilst other companies are still finding the best way forward. Some shows have eschewed video completely. We had great fun working with the Penny 4 team on Up In Smoke, a drama podcast with Mei Mac and Adam Buxton. It used no video assets at all. However with the right mix of PR, platform relationships and really great content, the show sat in the number one position in the Fiction charts for most of November and December and had weeks in the top 50 overall too.

The nature of the show meant it wasn’t able to be filmed - that would be like making an expensive Netflix series. It was also designed to demonstrate the team’s skill at audio - they were already well known for video. But also it demonstrated successful IP that could be translated to screens. In other words they had a plan.

We’ve also worked on quite a few shows where the video and audio is treated in similar ways. Pod Save the UK, made by Reduced Listening and part of the Crooked Media network, was like many of their shows - full video from the start. When the show was being built, delivering for both was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Initially sitting with the established Pod Save the World on YouTube to drive awareness and sampling, it now sits on its own channel that we launched shortly after the general election.

Having access to good video really helped establish the show on social media. At the launch, the host Nish Kumar was well known. It was important to demonstrate this was his podcast, and showing fans what they would get from him on the show was important. His co-host was a newcomer - Coco Khan. The video meant we could demonstrate their great chemistry and introduce them as a new duo.

I think if you want to see the best modern take on combining video, audio and social in the UK, you have to look at what The Fellas Studios are doing. Set up in 2020 by YouTubers Callum Airey and Joshua Larkin, they’re the people behind The Fellas Podcast, Saving Grace and Dad V Girls After Hours. These shows skew younger, do well on YouTube and Spotify with some audience elsewhere too. They are not your traditional ‘top show’ on Apple Podcasts.

They’ve built a great studio set-up for their shows, which really shines on YouTube and socials and they've kept a youthful feeling that very few other UK shows have. You can even watch their weekly behind the scenes show, if you want to understand more about their operation. They’re very much a podcast company, but they’re not obsessed with audio. Outside of Goalhanger, they’re probably the only people in the UK that have managed to launch a number of shows successfully, at scale.

We re-tooled a show close to my heart this year - my own! The Media Club had its roots as The Guardian’s Media Talk starting in 2006 (!) before becoming its own stand-alone thing in 2014 as The Media Podcast, produced by Rethink Audio.

I took over as host in 2021. We’d been producing a video version of the podcast since April 2023 - but it was very much a visualised version of the podcast that we put on YouTube. In other-words the video was sort of incidental to the show, we had filmed what we had already been making. The main benefit was that we had clips to use on social media, it was more about the marketing than having a video show.

Last year we wanted to re-brand, the name, The Media Podcast, wasn’t brilliant for SEO (or cut through!) and we needed to update the artwork and really think more about the show format. We were also keen to ‘dog food’ a re-brand and look at the issues when reformulating a show.

One of the challenges lots of creators find with ‘always on’ shows is to have the time to do this work. After 10 years it was probably due a rethink and a polish. We used our brief summer pause to re-brand the show The Media Club, update all of the socials, build a new website, give it a new look and tweak some of the format points. The other big thing was to think more about the video side. The key challenge was really a production one. The show is recorded on a Thursday afternoon and then comes out at Midnight. We needed the edit to remain quick. For the video side to work, we needed to use a proper video environment with minimal set-up time - it needed to be ready to work. We found a great studio in Podshop that had the look we wanted - a trendy living room that matched a media club in its feel. Generally we’re ready to go in fifteen minutes and we’re practiced enough that the show follows a prepped running order and recorded ‘as live’ without the need to do too many pickups. The show is relatively simple with three camera angles, a host, guest and wide, so the producer does a live vision mix. Changes for pace and relevance happen in the edit.

The show is edited in Descript and exported for audio. The video is then cut automatically by Descript, and tidied up by the Podcast Discovery team who can use the isolated shots to fix any vision mixes. They then export the final versions for YouTube and Spotify. Audio comes out at Midnight and the video version is ready by Midday. The video team then makes the short-form clips too.

Within the resources we have, the show works as a video experience. It looks like it's made for people watching. It seems high quality and worthy of someone’s time. It is perhaps not entirely optimised for YouTube. We keep in things like introductions, though we’ve shortened them significantly, something you probably wouldn’t do if you were only making a YouTube video. There is, like all these things, some compromises.

At the same time, for the thousands of regular listeners, I don’t think they notice that much of a difference. It still very much works as an audio podcast.

So what has been the effect of the changes? We changed a few things at the same time, so some of the benefits are likely to come from a variety of the alterations. The re-brand, though, gave us a reason to think about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Getting off the treadmill of always-on to do some strategy was worthwhile. The changes we made to the look of the show on all platforms and a tidy up of the format made the show better. The increase in visual quality of the full video episodes and the short-form have made what we do look more professional. Whether people consume the full thing or not, there’s been a significant uptick of people talking to me about the show and a lot of that has been driven by how it looks.

Listening on the audio platforms (the RSS-fed ones) has increased since the rebrand. Growth has replaced a static listenership. Long-form video consumption has more than doubled since before the changes and some episodes have had 10x previous viewing if they catch a nerve.

We’ve been adding the video versions to Spotify. Now this is an audience that was previously audio-only, so I was fascinated to see how they would interact with the video. They were clearly happy with the audio, so there’s no reason for them to come to the show for the video. Generally around a third of the people who consume the show on Spotify see at least 1 minute of video and collectively it accounts for about 20% of the total time spent on the show.

I think this is pretty good, and higher than I thought it would be. I think it shows that you can’t make assumptions about the audience and how they want to consume what you make.

Our rebrand is designed to make the show platform agnostic. The Media Club, no longer The Media Podcast, is a weekly show about the media. You can listen to it or watch it, we’re happy if you do either. We are not making the decision for our consumers. Indeed, for some people, giving it 45 mins a week isn’t possible so they just watch the clips, or they subscribe to the newsletter.

The newsletter, sitting on a Substack at themediaclub.com, delivers a weekly edition explaining who’s on the show and the topics. It also has the links to all the stories we talk about, that we used to just send to the contributors. And you know what, I’m fine if people just want to get the newsletter for the links if the show doesn’t fit in with their lives.

The Media Club is niche, but it’s a multi-media brand. Video, Audio, Social, Email. We reach interested media folks on platforms relevant to them.

The other thing I’ve noticed since the changes, alongside more people talking to me about it, is that many more industry PRs have got in touch to get their bosses on, and the show will likely be better for it. That’s driven particularly by the high-quality video. Whilst the scale of the audience hasn’t changed that much and neither has the content, the perception has really altered.

Another big reason to do all these changes to The Media Club was that we wanted to see the specific implications of moving to include video so we were better equipped to talk to our Podcast Discovery clients.

As well as the things above, we learned a hell of a lot about the big decisions you need to think about with regards to RSS vs YouTube vs Spotify Video and how that can affect monetisation and marketing.

Let’s talk more about that tomorrow in the last part of this series. I’ll see you then!

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This is part three of a series about video and podcasts. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and the final part here.

Previously on Matt On Audio… The move to video for podcasters isn’t because audio is dead or dying - of course people are always going to want something that works just in their ears - but because consumer behaviour has been changing and video is the platform that many users, particularly young ones, are using for personal, speech-based content.

Simultaneously, in the same way that Serial and Apple Podcasts on the iPhone defined what podcasting was for many people in 2014, in 2024 the press showing video of Joe Rogan or Call Me Daddy and endless clips of people speaking into microphones on TikTok, has defined what podcasting is today.

Consumers don’t define podcasting by platform - broadly listening to an MP3 file on a phone - but by content type - people having long-form conversations (on whatever platform). For many of these people, because they grew up with YouTube and see this content on YouTube, they regard podcasting as something that is video-first.

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Of course, many audio OGs look at this with horror! We should defend podcasting as an audio medium. By doing video we are losing the key things that made (audio) podcasts successful. There’s also very valid discussions that (audio) podcasts aren’t just chat shows. There are documentaries, dramas, things that would be unable or very uneconomic to make video versions of - which of course is hard to argue with.

My friend James Cridland, from the excellent Podnews, in his Podnews Weekly Review podcast, thinks podcasters should concentrate on what he sees as one of it’s core USPs: “Entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy”. He thinks that the medium should very much be audio-first.

I don’t think audio is going away at all. Audio podcasting is popular, with about a quarter of the UK tuning in. If I was making something that was a long-form conversation, I think you would be mad not to make it available as a podcast.

I do have some worries though, about putting all my eggs in the audio-only basket. Firstly, non-TV video consumption has been growing fast, from YouTube but also from TikTok and the like. Consumers are spending large amounts of time there. The mobile nature of much of this consumption whether on a train or a sofa can more obviously eat into time previously allocated for audio-podcasts. I would worry about doubling down on entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy. Podcast and radio’s success has often come from it being background consumption. The challenge with mobiles is that much of the consumption is video, which comes with its own audio through the same headphones. Any active mobile use significantly reduces podcast consumption. Sure, you’re less likely to consume video on a run or in the car, leaving that to podcasts (or owned music) but why should we be retreating to leave podcasting in just certain environments?

Audio-only podcasting does also seem to have a growth problem. Whilst there’s always new shows that launch and do well and there’s some big hitters doing phenomenal numbers at the top of the charts, many historic shows have been plateaued. They’re finding it hard to grow new listeners. Now, this is partly the result of increased competition and also a lack of focus on marketing. Previously that wasn’t something most shows had to worry about. The sector’s growth meant a rising tide carried all ships. If the influx of new listeners has perhaps slowed and there’s more competition, the fight for people’s time is going to be harder.

Most people create content because they want it to be consumed. Podcast creators are focused on their listening numbers, but they also get excited about TikTok views, social shares, or someone writing about their work. They’re excited when more people get their stuff. Now, of course, there needs to be discussion about getting value (cash or otherwise), but getting people to listen, watch or read is all good.

Now podcasting has been an efficient way to make content, distribute it and monetise it. But as I talked about yesterday, a separate group of people were doing something similar in the YouTube world at the same time and more recently, another bunch of folks were making short-form video for socials.

Most podcast creators are in the long-form conversation business. They came to audio as it was the easiest, or most efficient for them, way of producing their material. The audio ecosystem allowed that to be catalogued and distributed relatively easily to consumers through apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Additionally ad-networks like Acast or Audioboom allowed them to monetise these conversations.

To me, the choice of podcasting for most creators is rarely about audio. It’s more about it being an efficient system for content creation and distribution.

The fundamental challenge though is new audiences that previously gravitated to audio-only podcasting have been redirected to places that deliver video content. Video content consumption is also in more environments - the living room’s big screen, tablets and mobiles in and around the home including in bed, the screen at work and the mobile in environments in which you wait - like a bus stop, a train journey, the doctor’s office.

Also, for many, video content is no longer just something that you give your full attention too. How much scrolling do people do when they’re watching TV? How many people have a YouTube video running in a second tab (or second screen) whilst doing some work? Video is starting to occupy the background listening need-state that podcasting (and radio) have always owned.

I’m also not saying that no audio is consumed in some of these video places, or that there aren’t great audio environments like a smart speaker at home, driving a car, walking the dog etc - but audio faces a strong competitor in the battle for people’s time.

If you are in the long-form conversation business, I think it’s essential to be focused on your potential consumers and how they spend their time. To be successful, you need to distribute your content in the ways that best appeal to them and make them more likely to consume it. If you’re trying to sell a product, you want it to be in every store and not just in Sainsbury’s (no matter how successful it is doing there).

If someone does not listen to podcasts but watches YouTube videos in your genre, should you be trying to teach them to try podcasts, or should you put your content in a place they are already visiting?

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I am suggesting that if you make an audio-only podcast that could be visualised, then you should be thinking how it can be adapted to suit both audio and video environments.

I’m not suggesting a pivot to video away from anything else. As I said before, if you’re making long-form conversation content, of course it should exist as a podcast in audio-only places, but I think it would be strange to maroon it there whilst consumers elsewhere would like it too.

Now I completely understand that adding a full video episode to your output is likely to be a complex thing from both a production perspective and likely from a monetisation one too. There’s definitely significant implications if you go down this route.

So tomorrow let’s talk about some examples of where video has been added to podcasts and what the effect’s been. I’ll see you then!

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This is part two of series about video and podcasting. Read part one here and part three here.

I spent a lot of time in 2024 talking to podcasters about video. Some are angry, some are excited, lots are perplexed.

YouTube’s push into being a home for podcasters and Spotify’s desire for podcasters to upload video versions of their episodes are gravitational forces that seem to be dragging podcasters, willing or not, into switching on the cameras.

On the more refusenik end, there’s a discussion about the brilliance of audio (for listeners and creators) and the desire not to kowtow to the big platforms. There’s often talk of ‘defending’ audio and that it’s a special medium of its own.

For those excited by it, video offers a way to reach more audience, specifically driven by YouTube’s content discovery algorithms. It also offers another stream of cash either through video ads, or Spotify’s as-yet, under-explained, subscription revenue share. Plus I think there’s also probably a bit about ego too - looking good on a screen.

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My own podcast background is from doing it for big radio groups, doing it for smaller audio startups, running the British Podcast Awards and now with Podcast Discovery, talking to lots of people who want to grow their show.

When we did the Awards it became very clear that podcasters' objectives are very much not aligned. ‘Podcasters’ were doing it for many different reasons. We often referred to the Awards as a very big, broad tent. It ranged from people making shows for fun in a kitchen to massive media organisations, from small businesses appealing to a niche to high-value talent wanting to own their audience directly. Some weren’t bothered about the cash, others saw it as a way to escape the nine to five, a few were using it as a route to develop a new creative business whilst others saw it as a new platform to monetise their fans.

I think it would be really hard to create a trade body for podcasting because why people are doing it is so varied. It would be difficult to get them to agree on what the body should do! A key part of the initial rise of podcasting was that individuals could create a show with very few barriers to entry. Today, if someone doesn’t want to do video, that’s fine. There’s lots of ways to execute a podcast and build an audience. Doing that purely in audio is not going to go away.

At the same time, anyone would be mad not to think that the world, and consumers, do change. A stand alone iPod was transformative and a design classic, but the job it did was more important than the device it was on. A thousand songs in your pocket was a more successful proposition than the concept of a click wheel. Yes, there are still some people that are searching eBay so they can get a replacement, as for them it was the perfect device for listening to music, but most people have moved on. As I describe media use below, and to stop me having to continually point it out, that just like the iPod not everyone consumes media the same way - I’m trying to describe what the larger groups of people do - please don’t get offended by your edge case - “well, I listen to shows on my smart fridge I’ll have you know!”

I don’t think video podcast viewers are the natural successor to audio podcast listeners. I haven’t seen much evidence that audio listeners wholesale move their consumption to YouTube once they’ve ‘seen the light’. The success of the audio podcast is often about how it fits into someone’s day. For many it’s an accompaniment that does not require full attention. It leans into what radio’s learned, that being a background medium is a superpower.

Whether the device plays video or not, it’s a screen that’s not often on. Most likely in a pocket, or on a car dashboard. In the UK, RAJAR’s MIDAS report suggests that podcast listening is more likely to come at the expense of people’s owned music than it does for radio listening. In other words, one non-linear background media has partly replaced another.

For me the much bigger question is how people get into listening to podcasts. I think the first major interaction with podcasts were three interlinked events. The stand alone podcast app for the iPhone came out in June 2012, the year in which smart-phone penetration hit 50% and seven years after Apple put podcasting into the iTunes app. By 2012 there were a decent number of shows - many from people consumers have heard of - if you pressed that new podcast button. Then in 2014, Serial, was the first cross-over mainstream hit. For many people they could now hit that button, and tune into something they had heard a lot about, for free, on a mainstream device connected to the internet.

But you have to remember that the iPhone was an expensive device and Serial was an intelligent product. It also appealed to people well-versed in listening to something. Podcasting started out, post-early adopters, as something a little older (at least 25+) and up-market.

In 2014, at the same time, new creators Pewdiepie, Jenna Marbles, Zoella, Vsauce and Stampy were enjoying huge YouTube success with younger and less well-off audiences.

The original vlogging - individuals talking to the camera - alone or with their friends has many similarities with what was happening in audio-only podcasting. Their separate successes were more about demographics on platforms than it was about the content they created. Indeed both platforms had loads of material that wasn’t chatting. Dramas and documentaries on podcasts and lots of clips of media on YouTube. Indeed many older audiences were following a link to a video on YouTube, whilst younger consumers were subscribing to their fellow content creators. But these younger audiences were basically doing the same thing on YouTube as older audiences were doing on podcasts, hitting subscribe on their favourite shows.

So both have been chugging along quite happily for the last ten years. So what’s changed? Well, in the YouTube space many of those vloggers have grown up and transitioned into more traditional podcast formats. Some people were always there or thereabouts. A bit of Googling finds the first episode of The Joe Rogan Experience on his YouTube channel. It’s a live stream and as one of the commentators says it’s like “watching cavemen discover fire”.

Rogan was video-first from the start and whilst he had an audio-only hiatus whilst taking Spotify’s money, it’s his spiritual home. Whilst not to my taste, the show is hugely popular and still generates outsized press coverage. What the show is, where it is and how it looks, leads many consumers discovering ‘podcasting’ through Joe Rogan to link the two. A podcast’s a video thing, right? As Serial taught people what a podcast is in 2014, Rogan does the same in 2024.

It’s not just Joe Rogan of course. In the US shows like Impaulsive, self-described as “The world's greatest, most thought-provoking, mentally stimulating podcast in the history of mankind…” do a million views an episode, whilst not troubling the Apple Podcast charts. Other shows like The Pat McAfee Show are again, something different. It’s a TV show streamed on ESPN+, his YouTube channel and released as an audio podcast. It gets half a million views on YouTube and is the number 10 sports podcast in the US.

Both of these could easily be dismissed as not proper podcasts, but they’ve claimed the word podcast and are teaching new-to-podcasting consumers that a podcast isn’t something that’s driven by a platform, it’s a type of content - people having a discussion - that you can watch. It doesn’t mean you can’t get it elsewhere, but the core visual, is er, visual.

This seeing is believing concept is only heightened by social media. The last few years has seen the transition away from text-based social media - Twitter, Facebook etc - to video based ones - TikTok, Instagram Reels etc. People are spending far more time in these places, and younger audiences are native consumers of it.

As an aside, social clips reinforce the idea of a podcast as video. Conversation, into large visible microphones, instantly makes people think - podcast. There is some talk about trying to wrestle the word podcast back to audio. That battle is lost. The audience does not see podcasting as a particular medium, they see it as a content type. People talking into a microphone.

If you hang out in the podcasting subreddit, you’ll see lots of posts about people starting shows asking the same questions over and over again about what gear they should use. In the last year ‘what microphone should I use’ has been replaced by ‘what camera should I use’. New, youthful creators see podcasting as ‘people talking into a microphone’ rather than making an MP3.

Anyway, back to phones. Fundamentally they’re interactive, always on devices that give high levels of engagement. The entire world is accessible through them. Ubiquitous connectivity means they can be a lean-forward filler of any available time. Of course, a phone can do lean-back as well, with audio accompanying a run etc, but its sweet-spot is lean-forward.

Again, in RAJAR’s MIDAS survey you see time and again that linear radio performs poorly on mobile devices. It’s an active, choice-based medium. People use it to find what’s relevant to them, web searches, TikTok feeds and even podcasts are all personal. There’s not a shared experience between people’s phones. Radio, in a shared space, is often the ‘least worst option’ for the people consuming it - it’s designed to be mass appeal, consumed by many.

Podcasts, as a personal medium, do well on a phone too, but it competes with a little bit of everything, all of the time - the ease of the internet, YouTube, Netflix, messaging - all often more active engagement than an audio show. But I think it’s less about the device, and more about people’s availability and what their hierarchy of consumption is. Where they are, and what suits them for that moment.

The emergence of podcasting was a confluence of technology (for both making and listening) and general internet connectivity. It built on the fact that people were comfortable with the concept - “it’s a bit like radio programmes delivered to your phone” - and it occupied radio’s great selling point - working as a background medium and it was free! It was accelerated by the (relative) ease to make audio content. It’s awareness was driven by talent jumping on board (again, relatively easily) and using their channels to promote their shows, word-of-mouth from passionate fans and publicity around break-out hits - Gervais, Serial, Rogan, My Dad Wrote A Porno, Shagged Married Annoyed.

Fundamentally though, it was media that could be inserted into an already busy media diet. Walking, travelling and personal time with the headphones in. In 2005 to 2015 radio had failed to occupy this place due to noisy FM reception issues and inadequate streaming. Podcasting’s competition was owned-music, saved to a device. It grew fast.

Meanwhile the growth of internet video consumption during this time, the early days of vlogs and YouTube, was driven by its own unique environment. Firstly it was tethered. Computer-based consumption and later broader devices through wifi at home. Similar to podcasts it was personal. YouTube was rarely watched by people together. It may well have been shared, but consumption was usually solitary. Individual laptops in bedrooms whilst others in the household consumed video on the big TV.

The last ten years has seen YouTube remain personal but it has become untethered. It still occupies key real estate at home, but ubiquitous connectivity means for many people, particularly the younger ones, it now sits in a place that audio podcasts occupied for older audiences. You only have to walk down a train, or past people on a platform to see that “travelling and personal time with the headphones in” is now often dominated by video.

Before podcasts and video, the Metro newspaper, launching in March 1999 was an instant hit, it delivered a new product to cater for a need and distributed it to the right places. Its success wasn’t entirely about the content - though it was timely and well designed for the audience - its success came from catering for a human need in a specific environment… and delivering.

So what does this all mean for audio podcasters today? How should you think about what you make and how you distribute it and where does video fit in? Read about that in part 2 here.

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The changes to the UK’s radio regulations kicked in last week. Local radio stations are now freed from their format restrictions, have been given complete flexibility on any local programming, and services in the country’s ‘nations’ no longer have any additional requirements. The only committments that remain are those around providing local news.

A sensible decision as local monopolies have disappeared and digital competition for listeners and advertising has supersized, or a terrible indictment on the country’s commitment to local content? Perhaps somewhere in between.

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The final nature of the country’s commercial radio networks is now up to the people that run them - Global, Bauer, Communicorp, Nation and News UK - as well as the handful of remaining local radio operators.

Changes can be made in network programming, but also down to the transmitter level - which will broadcast what?

Money drives much of the decision making, from staffing costs to running buildings but they’re also thinking about how audiences are changing, what advertisers demand (or understand) and how stations sit alongside their competitors.

First out of the gate with a change is Bauer Media who are removing the regional afternoon shows from Greatest Hits Radio, meaning that Kate Thornton will be replacing Heidi Secker, John Marshall, Mark Collins, Andy Goulding, Martin Starke, Scott Temple & Holly Day, Steve Priestly, Tony Wright and Stuart Webster.

This afternoon show is second only to Ken Bruce in the ratings in both reach and share. Reach is below, but its share of 7.3% is higher than the station’s average - 6.1% and only Ken Bruce at 8.7% beats it.

Of course, it’s not just the presenters that make it a success - the music, Ken’s lead-in, brand environment etc are important too, but it’s hard not to feel sad for a group of people that clearly have been doing something right.

Looking at its overall figures, the network was down a fraction quarter on quarter, but up significantly year on year, as it added more stations to its network. As the changes have settled, it will be interesting to see how it does going forward. The press release says it’s “the most listened to commercial station in the country and has 7.4m weekly listeners” - this is based on its hours of 64m. More people tune in to Capital and Heart, however, with 7.5m and 9.7m reach respectively.

It’s hard to look at the Kiss and Hits numbers in London, as Bauer has replaced the Kiss London RAJAR Entry with a Hits London one that combines Kiss’ analogue audience with Hits’ digital one, even though it was barely on-air on the quarter. I had a go at piecing it together but it was tough. It’s likely Kiss in London would have seen a decline, probably to the point where Capital Xtra London is likely neck and neck, or even a little ahead. I similarly found it difficult to decode the broader Hits Radio network which combines recently rebranded stations, differently branded Scottish stations and a pure play version of the network too. Bauer suggests its reach is 7.2m.

Kisstory remains the stand-out part of the Kiss brand, delivering 2.3m reach (stable q-on-q, down from 2.5m y-on-y) and 9.1m hours vs the regular Kiss at 1.6m reach (down from 2m q-on-q and 2.5m y-on-y) - who suffered from losing attribution of analogue listening in London and the regions too. Nationally the mostly digital Capital Xtra leads it, marginally, at 1.7m its best figures since 2019.

Poor figures for Magic with reach down to 2.2m nationally (from 3.1m a year ago, and 2.6m last quarter) and in London a year on year drop from 1.5m to 1m. It’s going through a recently instigated programming change with a music shift at the moment no doubt to try and adjust this direction.

Absolute celebrates its highest ever network figure at 5.7m, though the main station falls a little back this quarter and is around 400k down year on year.

Looking at the two main radio groups, Bauer’s reach is pretty flat over the quarter and the year, but its hours have dropped. Global, on the other hand, has seen sustained growth and a significant hours jump.

Both groups have altered their national digital line-ups recently, with big changes for Global as they add 12 new stations. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in future RAJARs.

Late last month Bauer issued a press release talking about the business - “In Audio, Bauer is pursuing a growth strategy based on a lean broadcasting business and investing in digital audio offerings, as well as enhancing efficiency and collaboration.”

It’s a surprisingly honest line. There are lots of excellent things about Bauer’s business and something like Greatest Hits’ speedy evolution clearly shows a great ability to innovate. I think the challenge for much of the non-spin offs - the core stations like Absolute Radio, Magic and Kiss - is they lack any real investment. I haven’t seen any marketing for them, and there’s clearly a talent bill reduction - shown by Frank Skinner and Ronan Keating’s departure. It would definitely fit the ‘lean broadcasting’ description above.

A lack of marketing, reduced talent, combined with a significant proportion of airtime being given over to networked contesting makes growth for these services significantly harder to deliver.

For my radio fan side, this of course makes me sad. On the business side of my brain I understand it. Radio is massively more efficient than it used to be and changes that “enhance efficiency” make them much more profitable businesses. Premium rate revenues are a big part of that. But there can be a dangerous situation where stations rely more and more on them. If you make the radio stations less listenable, any short term gains will soon be outweighed by a declining audience (and then revenue).

At the moment in the “Rayo Network competition” across all the stations, they’re giving away an impressive £400,000. However after a few years of non-stop cash giveaways, it can seem pretty unremarkable on-air, especially as the mechanic has been streamlined to “register and wait for a call” no doubt to remove friction to generate more £2.50 texts. There’s not a lot of passive entertainment value there for listeners whether they choose to play or not.

Global

Over at Global, as mentioned above, some sustained growth across the group with decent year on year progress for all of its main networks, except for Classic FM (with perhaps its worst reach number for a few decades). Capital and Heart are particularly impressive.

Widening the look to the brands, to take into account the spin-offs, you can see the significant impact they made, particularly on the hours side:

BBC

The BBC has done pretty well this quarter. Radio 1 and 2 seem to have stabilised. Radio 3, 4, 5 and Sports Extra did well. Radio 3, had its highest ever hours.

The story for local radio in England remains poor. I’m sure it’s still recovering from changing so many shows, but I don’t hear about much marketing, or adesire to try and benefit from commercial radio’s evacuation from local programming.

AOB

If you haven’t caught it, do check out my podcast - The Media Club. Watch it on YouTube and Spotify, listen to it on Apple, Amazon Music and everywhere else you get podcasts. This Friday me and Adam Bowie will be catching up about RAJAR. You can read his blog analysis about this quarter here. There’s also more data at Radio Today.

Thanks to Hallett Arendt who’s excellent Octagon software allows me to analyse RAJAR data so quickly.

What have I missed? Leave it in the comments.

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I get to quickly review the RAJAR data by using the excellent Octagon from Hallett Arendt. Go check it out if you need to do that too!

With some of the quarterly results of the RAJARs - the UK’s radio ratings - there just seems to be plenty of good news. It usually coincides with the population update. This time around the population universe is up to 57.6m from 56.3m and radio listeners are up to 50.8m from 49.9m which means there’s more people to play with!

Before we get to that though, a quick look at the platforms. DAB has its highest ever reach with 71.4% of the UK (that’s 36.2m people) tuning in. AM/FM is listened to by 55.3% and 29.4% consume through a smart speaker. When we look at share - the amount of listening - DAB is the largest with 42.8%, AM/FM’s hit a new low at 26.3% with DTV at 2.7%. 11.1% of listening is through a phone, the web or internet radios whilst 17% of all listening is through a smart speaker (a new high).

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The changing nature of consumption means DAB is pretty essential for radio stations now - if you don’t show up on that dial, the available time people can give to you is very low. Whilst anyone can be on smart speakers, its essential that stations stay top of mind. With presets you can occupy a place on a radio, but with voice listeners have to remember to ask for you.

I think for smaller radio stations, especially ones that are an occasional listen, significant thought has to go in marketing touch points - newsletters, social, outdoor etc - to remind people you exist and to provide a value proposition - a ‘why’ to tune in.

A change of presenters is one way to attract attention for radio stations. We’ve talked much about Ken Bruce swapping from BBC Radio 2 to Greatest Hits Radio, but at the beginning of this quarter, Radio 1’s Jordan North crossed the street to start on the Capital Breakfast Show.

Jordan isn’t on Capital Scotland and their Welsh-language opt-out, but is still across most of ‘Capital Network UK’. The figures for his 6am to 10am slot show an increase quarter on quarter and year on year from 2.6m to 2.9m - but this data includes two quarters - the one before he started as well.

Looking at the data for Capital London - which is measured on a single quarter - you can see a q-on-q increase from 654k to 792k and similar for the year on year figure. He seems to have definitely made an impact. It’s also helped Capital’s total listening too, with y-o-y reach up nearly a million from 6.01m to 6.99m. Q-on-q they’re up from 6.2m.

Over at Radio 1 you would expect them to have seen a bit of an impact, but they’ve had a pretty good book, with the station jumping q-on-q from 7.3m to 8.1m (y-on-y is up from 7.6m).

Comparing the 6am to 10am time period Greg James (who’s on for most of that) has managed to grow his audience from 3.8m to 3.9m, no mean feat with competition from his ex-colleague. However over on Jordan’s old Drivetime slot the growth has been even more substantial - up to 3.3m (a q-on-q increase from 2.8m and y-on-y from 3.0m).

Over at the other main youth station Kiss, Radio 1 and Capital’s strength has not been helpful. It’s down to a reach of 2m (a nearly 300k drop q-on-q and nearly 500k y-on-y). 150k of that quarterly loss is in London. The Kiss Network’s reach remains relatively stable over the last year, a little down, but still delivering 4m. The hours drop from 21m to 17.8m will hurt though.

Kisstory is now bigger than the main Kiss with a weekly reach of 2.3m (up on the quarter, down on the year) and its hours of 9.6m is ahead of its stablemate’s 8.0m. Kiss suffers from younger audiences listening to the radio less and is not helped by little marketing from Bauer and an events focus on Kisstory.

It’s also has to contend with competition from Capital Dance which is now bringing in 1.1m listeners a week and 5.4m hours.

Older Stations

There’s an interesting battle happening between the slightly older targeted stations - Magic, Greatest Hits Radio, Smooth and BBC Radio 2.

GHR’s entry upset much of this older end, with Radio 2 dropping from 14.5m post-pandemic to 13.3m now. It impacted Smooth’s reach, but with a music policy change, as well as some marketing, they’ve seen a return to growth. Similarly Magic was hit initially and then saw some slow growth. A schedule change, and a lack of marketing to support it (and as of yesterday the loss of Ronan Keating on Breakfast) puts it in a difficult position.

GHR though may have peaked, it saw its national reach drop slightly from 7.6m to 7.5m. I think this means the other stations now have a chance to reset and see where they can find space in the market.

So what are they all doing? Well, usually these write-ups are quite text based for something that talks about audio! You might not be a regular listener to BBC Radio 2, Magic, Smooth and GHR - but could you guess what they sound like? I’ve compiled a mix of the music from the 8am hour yesterday, can you guess which is which? I’ll reveal the answers below.

Number 1:

Number 2:

Number 3:

Number 4:

When we look at the reach profile for each station - the percentage of audience in each demographic, it’s an interesting mix…

Radio 2’s the oldest - with half of its audience over 55, and GHR a little older than Smooth.

I’m not a regular listener to any of those stations, but as a 45 year-old, gulp, I’m probably in the demo for most of them. I felt that GHR seemed quite old sounding, the lack of any contemporary songs is noticeable. I thought the Smooth Radio mix was pretty good, significantly more upbeat than it used it to be and it didn’t feel as old, it has definitely been reinvented as a solid AC. Magic is obviously a mix of contemporary and classics and very listenable. Radio 2 had the highest number of songs unfamiliar to me - particularly the country-infused ones - and was surprisingly contemporary when you look at the demographic mix. Their repositioning to better cater for the 35-45s is certainly noticeable but I feel for the oldies.

So what were they all? Well, Number 1 was Radio 2, Number 2 was Magic, Number 3 was Smooth and Number 4 was GHR. Is it what you thought? Tell me in the comments!

Elsewhere

Over at News UK, talkSPORT is celebrating its best ever reach with the network delivering 3.7m listeners. Times Radio is still pretty stationary with 478k reach, now overtaken by the audio feed of GB News with 518k. The loss of Matt Chorley to Five Live is probably unlikely to help. talkRADIO saw its reach fall back a little to 690k (from 757k) not helped by a constantly changing schedule in the wake of all of the Talk TV machinations.

The main Virgin Radio is up 8% to 1.6m and the network as a whole up 14% to 2.1m. Irish import Ryan Tubridy is up to 503k, a q-on-q rise from 457k and y-on-y from 488k. Chris Evans delivers 900k across the network, up marginally q-on-q and up from 863k y-on-y.

Radio X has delivered its highest ever reach of 2.3m. Moyles delivers 1.2m and Johnny Vaughan’s over 1m for the first time. A best ever result for the Absolute Radio Network too - now reaching 5.6m.

Another best ever for Fun Kids - its London 10+ reach is 142k.

Over at BBC Local Radio in England I imagine a sigh of relief with numbers stabilising, if not really growing. They’re up around 100k q-on-q to 4.8m (but down from 5.5m y-on-y). What’s that looking like across the schedule?

A quick glance would suggest that the many breakfast show changes have hit the network hard, with mid-mornings performing a little better. The least affected is the most regionalised - afternoons. Late evenings seems quite challenged too.

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Also check out Radio Today’s round up and Adam Bowie’s analysis too.

Data analysed using Hallett Arendt’s Octagon

The latest radio audience figures in the UK are out and there’s lots to be cheery about. First, radio listening is up, with total weekly reach increasing by nearly half a million listeners - resulting in 89% of the population tuning into linear broadcast radio each week.

People are surprised when I explain that this many people tune into a medium that’s over 100 years old, but contrary to popular belief, we are in a golden age of audio!

The combination of stations, the formats and styles they cover, the talent they have and the platforms it’s delivered on - when taken together - provide a great, free, bundle for UK listeners.

Alongside this there’s a strong and growing range of on-demand content through podcasts - again with excellent talent covering a broad selection of topics. Let alone easy to use streaming services and audiobooks getting more accessible.

Part of the reason that UK radio has maintained its success is that the linear product has developed over the years to really take advantage of new platforms.

AM and FM radio listening has now dropped to its lowest level ever - just 27.0% of time spent listening. Indeed, its now fallen behind online radio which accounts for 27.8% of listening. DAB Digital Radio continues to provide the bulk of consumption at 42.6%.

I also think the investment - in the content, marketing and distribution - of DAB stations has also helped super-charge the success of these brands on smart-speakers too - a platform which now delivers 60% of that internet listening.

People often think that in-car listening is what drives radio success, actually its main location is in-home. Pre-pandemic it accounted for around 59% of total hours, post-pandemic it was 65% and it’s now settled down to 62% (I guess as a significant number of listeners spend more of their week at home).

At home listening is mainly tuning into a box - be it a DAB radio, smart-speaker or old FM set. A speaker pumping out entertainment and company in the background is a key reason that linear remains strong.

Where linear radio does badly is on a device like the phone. According to RAJAR’s MIDAS study, only 4% of listening to linear radio is through a phone. The phone is a brilliant media device as it can access a huge amount of material - TV, podcasts, games, the web, music - but it’s a device driven by active, lean-forward, personalised curation. That’s why at the other end of the spectrum, 76% of podcast listening (according to MIDAS) is carried out on a phone.

So, for linear radio, all hail the magic box. The speaker in the background. That 89% of the country use to be entertained and informed.

But, what are they listening to?

When All Radio is strong, lots of stations end up being quite strong - or at least stable too.

Scouting through the data there are quite a few stations that have gone up for technical reasons as well as content ones.

A big headline is likely to be the success of Greatest Hits Radio - up to 7.6m from 6.7m - nearly a million! This isn’t all down to the power of Ken Bruce. Bauer’s restructuring of its networks has meant that lots of stations have changed how they’re reported and it’s confused much of my simple brain. The departing Wave 105 has been added into GHR (we’ll never see its final, stand-alone figure) and FM frequencies from the old Gem 106 and Lincs are in there too, plus I think expanding some TSAs may have an effect as well. It’s puzzling. But I think it’s now the new, final, baseline for the network.

Many of the individual GHR stations are up, but London has taken a hit, dropping 22% as it loses 316k listeners.

Similar to what’s happened at GHR, Bauer have re-branded many local ILRs as Hits Radio, in RAJAR they’re labelled their new names rather than what this survey measures - their old ones. However, the new overall Hits Radio figure includes these rebranded ones, the Hits Radio Brand includes those plus the Scottish and Northern Irish station and Hits Radio Network includes all of that plus the Greatest Hits Radio network. Confused? Yes, I am too.

Global likes grouping stations together too. The Heart Brand has 12.3m listeners, whilst the Heart Network has 9.4m. The former includes the decade stations and Heart Dance. The latter is the one with Jamie and Amanda on Breakfast (oh, except for in Scotland…). See it remains confusing!

When we look at the biggest hybrid local-national networks, here are the winners:

• Heart Network (UK) - 9,441k

• Greatest Hits Radio - 7,686k

• Capital Network (UK) - 6,242k

• Smooth Radio Network (UK) - 5,804k

• Hits Radio - 4,533k

  • + Hits Radio Scotland - 1,464k

Of course this is no longer the be all and end all for commercial radio - some single stations - are pretty large too. These are the ones over two million listeners.

• Classic FM - 4,400k (down 249k q-on-q)

• talkSPORT - 3,390k (up 309k q-on-q)

• Magic - 3,069 (down 354k q-on-q)

• LBC - 2,547 (up 80k q-on-q)

• Kiss - 2,293k (down 55k q-on-q)

• Absolute Radio - 2,236k (down 124k q-on-q)

• Kisstory - 2,089 (down 279k q-on-q)

• Radio X - 2,069k (up 56k q-on-q)

Over at the BBC:

• BBC Radio 1 - 7,309k (down 20k)

• BBC Radio 2 - 13,228k (down 52k)

• BBC Radio 3 - 1,995k (up 219k)

• BBC Radio 4 - 9,204k (up 87k)

• BBC Radio 5 live - 4,889k (down 355k)

• BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra - 971k (down 581k)

• BBC 6 Music - 2,548k (up 29k)

• BBC Radio 1Xtra - 786k (up 68k)

• BBC Radio 4 Extra - 1,505k (up 41k)

• BBC Asian Network UK - 542k (up 94k)

Pretty stable all round for the national networks, but with a nice increase for BBC Radio 3, as it returns to its baseline of around 2million listeners. Will Sam Jackson’s new schedule and a Proms season help it push upwards?

For BBC Local Radio, the English network has dropped to 4.7m (from 4.9m last quarter and 5.3m a year ago).

Whilst some individual stations have seen growth (year on year, Oxford up 27%, Cambridgeshire up 12% and CWR up 13%), there’s lots of big drops. Berkshire, Devon, Kent, Gloucestershire, Merseyside, Norfolk, Northampton, Sheffield has seen their reach drop over 20% year-on-year. BBC Radio Bristol’s reach has dropped 58.4% year on year (and its hours 73%!).

Many of these stations are seeing the fall-out from large simultaneous changes to presenter line-ups over a rocky year of change. It will be one to watch whether this is the bottom or not.

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Some news, just announced, that the BBC is preparing to launch some new national radio spin-off stations that they would like to broadcast in DAB+ on their national DAB Digital Radio multiplex.

Due to their public service nature, to achieve this aim the corporation will need to pass a Public Interest Test from Ofcom to ensure that they are not crowding out commercial stations and that they’re value for money etc.

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The stations planned include an enhanced version of Radio 1 Dance with more commissioned programming, rather than just repeated shows (as the current online version does) and a souped-up version of BBC Five Live Sports Extra using some of the BBC’s sports podcasts.

The new stations are un-named at the moment, but will include:

• Another Radio 1 spin-off station focused on new talent, and playing classic tracks from the past 20 years from artists Radio 1 has championed. Anthems-ish?

• A Radio 2 spin-off for the over 50s with UK music from the 50s to 70s. Radio 2 Boom it seems.

• A Radio 3 spin-off playing calmer classics and choral works. Radio 3 Smooth?

There’s full descriptions in the BBC’s press release.

As I mentioned in my blog post last week, the BBC has probably been ill-served as listeners moved to digital listening with having a station line-up preserved in aspic, whilst commercial stations have launched a raft of successful spin-offs. Of course the BBC did significant work to encourage digital radio take-up when it launched 6Music, 1Xtra and BBC 7 (now 4Extra) at the beginning of the 2000s.

All of the stations they have suggested make sense at first glance when thinking about gaps in the BBC’s provision, but perhaps less so when thinking about gaps in UK radio provision.

Commercial radio has been unhappy with the launch of Radio 1 Dance and felt so strongly that Ofcom messed up the process that they sued them, though lost the case last year. Global with Capital Dance and Capital Xtra and Bauer with Kiss (and its spin offs) felt targeted. I’m not sure this is likely to change with this announcement.

It’s been well-documented that Radio 2 has been trying to re-align its programming to make the station a little younger. That, alongside BBC Local Radio’s odd demographic changes, has definitely left a gap open on the older end. But it is one filled particularly by Boom Radio - but also Smooth, Gold and Greatest Hits.

In Norway, the public broadcaster had a similar issue with their main P1 station, they then launched P1+ for older listeners (often bringing back older talent too) it’s now the number one station for over 65s. Maybe this should be a Steve Wright-fronted vehicle?

Radio 3 is high-culture, but low-listening - as it has always been. It’s difficult to bring new listeners into the fold, so an easier, smoother way in is probably very sensible. The Controller of Sam Jackson also has a strong commercial radio and music industry background, so he’ll know what he’s doing.

The commercial radio owners of Classic FM, Smooth and Scala may have something different to say however.

The row, and there will be a row, will be between those who argue that licence-fee payers should have a range of BBC stations that appeal to them (that they pay for) vs an argument that there is no need for the BBC to do something that, arguably, commercial radio already does.

There will be the additional question about where the money comes from to run this. Whereas in reality I don’t imagine any of these will be that expensive, especially when run alongside a strong parent station, there will be questions about whether the BBC should be spending more money on these national stations when it’s cutting back on local provision.

When I heard that some new stations were slated to be launched, I did worry that one of them would be a reformulated CBeebies Radio (available on BBC Sounds) which would compete with my own Fun Kids. Whilst bringing more focus to children’s radio would be good, the scale of their ad-free operation and promotional power would have left me very worried.

Whilst I feel that the Globals and Bauers of this world should be able to stand-up against the BBC’s competition, I do worry about someone like the independent Boom Radio. They have made a big success financially and in ratings by doing something different and putting their own money with their mouth is. To see the BBC create a service for this audience seems a little off.

It’s also interesting that the Public Interest Test is for the DAB+ broadcast, not for the stations, as they plan to launch them all on BBC Sounds later this year anyway.

Like I’ve said though. Two things can both be right. Yes, the BBC should cater for all licence-fee payers but yes, they should also be careful about who they tread on whilst doing it.

AOB

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It’s RAJAR time again. Thanks to Hallett Arendt and their brilliant Octagon software I got to run all of these numbers on Wednesday so I had something hopefully interesting to show you today.

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Wow, two live reads in a row.

I remain intrigued by groups making big changes and the impact it has (or doesn’t). Radio and its audiences have changed so much over the past few years, it’s difficult to tell what will happen when you do something big.

Global relaunched the Scottish incarnations of Heart and Capital in May last year, but the latest figures show little change so far, with both reach and hours marginally down year on year.

Over at Absolute in May 2021, it lost its FM frequencies to Greatest Hits Radio and then it’s AM frequencies were turned off in Jan 2023 making it a digital-only station. Its FM change happened during the COVID RAJAR related pause, so if we look at the pre-COVID RAJAR of Q1/2020, it had a particularly good book, delivering 743k reach and 5.5m hours and now in London, digital-only, it’s delivering a 561k reach and 2.9m hours. Greatest Hits, meanwhile, has a 1.4m reach and 7.7m hours in the capital. Not a bad decision!

In April, Lincs FM became FMless as it surrendered its analogue output to Greatest Hits Radio. Its reach is now 141k (down from 239k) and hours from 3m to 1.1m. Meanwhile, Greatest Hits Radio Lincolnshire, now on FM, is delivering 150k reach and 1.5m hours. Collectively that’s 2.6m hours - so down overall. But perhaps it’s early days for both.

Early days too for Gem 106 who are on a similar path. They gave up their FM to GHR at the beginning of Q4 but are measured over 6 months. Their last full RAJAR in Q3 gave them a 264k reach and 2.1m hours, so far this quarter they’re marginally down to 240k and 1.9m hours. GHR is up a little 174k to 188k in reach and 1.2m to 1.4m hours. We’ll know more of what happens next quarter.

Interestingly for Lincs and Gem, they are due to change again, being re-branded alongside most of Bauer’s heritage ILR stations in England as Hits Radio. We’ll see how this changes their figures further, later in the year.

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Changes like these remain a sore point amongst radio fans, who feel the removal of local radio makes the medium seem somewhat reduced.

The birth of local radio, and its later financial success came much from regulation and the lack of media competitors (both radio and otherwise) for listening and for advertising revenue than it did the sparkling content.

I remember sitting in a client meeting with UKRD and hearing the Station Manager proudly stating that they weren’t running any national ads from (sales house) First Radio Sales (FRS), much to their annoyance. He was pleased because the local yield was around a £10 CPT per spot, whereas the national was £1.50. FRS were annoyed as this was a large station that they couldn’t deliver to their clients.

The station was able to do this because it had strong local advertisers, many of which couldn’t go elsewhere to reach a local audience - hence the price. Nowadays, whilst car dealers and double glazing companies are still good local radio targets, stations are competing with local targeting on Google and Facebook. It’s very much not the monopoly it was.

The changing nature of the ad market combined with the explosion in competition for listeners’ time means its harder to be able to afford a lot of local programming when your yield has been significantly reduced. Cutting the number of buildings and staff and delivering less local content, even if it reduces ratings, and broadcasting national material with some local opts is a much more profitable option for radio groups.

At the moment, a new bill is going through parliament that would mean radio groups would no longer have to provide any local programmes, providing they still deliver local news, travel and weather etc. This will mean it will be up to radio groups themselves whether the local content is worth the continued investment (for advertisers as well as audience). I am sure there will be some changes to the status quo - though I don’t necessarily think it will mean local programmes will disappear from all of the networks. We will see however.

For the big commercial radio groups, the changes to the local business model have happened alongside changes to the national one - all driven by consumer behaviour.

DAB Digital Radio now delivers 42.7% of all radio listening hours. Smart speakers deliver 14.7% which is over half the total hours from AM and FM radio. The digital platforms, when taken together, reach 86.5% of radio listeners and account for 72% of all listening hours. This huge digital reach means the stations listeners can choose have been widened massively.

Commercial radio’s business is driven by delivering hours to advertisers. Whereas previously the worry was about individual stations losing listeners and hours, now groups look towards the appeal of multi-station networks.

In Q1/2017, after many stations rebranded to Heart, they delivered Global 63.2m hours a week. Today that locally-delivered network, alongside their digital spin-offs generates 77m hours.

The people that invented the spin-off strategy was Absolute Radio. Clive Dickens, faced with a rebrand that hadn’t seemed to have gone to plan and an empty national digital radio multiplex, launched Absolute 80s as a hail mary. It worked. Not only delivering new hours to, at that time, the stand-alone Absolute Radio business, it also helped connect their main Absolute Radio with more listeners too. At the beginning of 2010 it had 13.6m hours, the network now delivers 33.1m for Bauer - a transformation.

If we look at BBC listening hours over time, like many stations, it’s no surprise that they’ve dropped. There’s more competition after all. But the BBC’s lack of development of its own networks, stymied by commercial radio and government, means the decline is not something they can do much about.

On top of all of that, the BBC has had to deal with significant cuts to its funding whilst still required to deliver more content on more platforms. Also like many media organisations it’s looking to choose to invest more in its digital products so legacy operations will take a hit.

No one’s happy when something’s taken away that they like, but I find it hard to disagree that the BBC needs to ensure its broader digital offer is developed.

One of the things that has been hit by cuts is BBC Local Radio. The bosses have decided to regionalise some elements - afternoons for example - and nationalise some evenings and weekends. The decision making about the structure and line-up of the local stations has taken a long time, already disrupting schedules (and staff morale) before the changes started to kick in at the end of last year.

In the last year BBC Local Radio in England has dropped its reach from 5.6m to 4.8m. It’s similar across all day-parts:

With many local stations reporting over six months, I imagine the worst is still to come.

Fundamentally, right now, I don’t think these drops are particularly about the replacement of local shows with regional or national ones. This will be more about listeners losing presenters that they are used to, and on a more speech and company station this will have a greater impact than on a music brand, and prompt churn.

With all radio (or any products) perception can drive experience whether or not it has a basis in fact. In 2024, even a nearly entirely networked service like a Viking FM can use technology to appear, to many listeners, that it remains a local radio station. Split sweepers and presenter links, phone numbers, local news, weather and travel can all give the appearance of a local station. GWR was achieving this is the 90s after all too.

It seems mad that the BBC, trying to integrate local, regional and national programming into a local station environment, hasn’t managed to use all the techniques commercial radio has been using for over 30 years. As I hear it, it’s variable station to station whether shared local shows can split news/travel/weather and many of the regional and national shows don’t even have splits on station names or the ability for presenters to drop local links.

If I was tasked with delivering a new kind of localised radio, getting the technology to do it would be at the top of my list. ViLOR was a great technology for local radio stations but it isn’t what these new types of stations need.

Oddly with these network changes I think there’s actually the opportunity to do a lot more localisation and enhance elements of the local service with the right tech stack. It would at least have given me some good news if I had to defend my changes to a select committee.

I’m not as vociferous about these BBC Local Radio changes as some. Strategically I think much of what they are doing is correct. I share colleagues views about disagreeing how it’s been done, especially when local radio’s budgets remain - to my eyes - pretty healthy.

As all the examples from earlier in the post show, you can’t deal with today’s radio world without reimagining how we deliver great audio for listeners. You also can’t do it on old technology and thinking.

Personally I would have merged local radio with Five Live but maybe that’s another blog post!

Demographics

I think it’s always useful to look at radio’s demographics, particularly to battle away incorrect perception. Civilians are still surprised when I tell them that 88% of the population listen to some form of radio each week and collectively they listen to a billion hours of it too.

There’s also the classic that young people don’t listen to the radio any more. Also not true.

That’s not to say there aren’t things to be concerned about. 15-24 reach is continuing to drop a little, though it’s not particularly precipitous. The amount they listen to has stayed pretty steady (though it’s significantly less than other demographics).

As I’ve touched on before, the focus of radio groups has tended to be on stations with older listeners. Greatest Hits and Smooth are the ones with big advertising campaigns. I don’t see any for Radio 1, Kiss and Hits. Capital’s not marketing as much as they used to. It’s sensible - older is where the hours are - and that’s where you make your money. But I continue to worry that the radio industry doesn’t care about younger listeners as much as it should.

One station that’s done well over the past few years is for the oldies, Boom Radio. This quarter though it’s fallen back a little, its reach is now 627k, last quarter it was 662k. It’s still up on a year ago, when it was 531k. However a Boomer tells me that it was the under 55s that dropped, and that it has record 55+ listeners! See - those pesky younger listeners causing problems for everyone.

AOB

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Last night I had a lovely evening at City University hearing about the British Podcast Awards winners, followed by a glass of wine and chatting to the journalism students (including those doing a Masters in Podcasting) who had come along to hear about what it takes to make an award-winning show. Remember that as you read this blog I wrote on the train home!

I’ve been writing these things for a long time- over 15 years. I’ve found I’ve become less concerned about the horse-race and the swaps between number one and number two, and instead I’m much more fascinated about the broader changes in listening behaviour and the results of bold decisions - good or bad.

There is no doubt that the Ken Bruce-enhanced Greatest Hits Radio, built on the basis of a strong music format that found a gap in the market plus an aggressive FM acquisition/conversion roll-out (alongside some other great talent) has hit the mark.

In the latest figures it shows a reach of 6,583k listeners, 55.9m hours and a 5.5% share of the market. This is up the best part of 800k reach from 5,787k last quarter and a then 4.7% share. Its average hours of 8.5 (up from 8.2) shows its listeners really love it too.

This surge puts it ahead of the Heart network, which whilst stronger on reach (8.5m), its weaker average hours of 6.3, means GHR takes the true top spot.

Since the Ken departure, all eyes have been on Radio 2. It took a bit of a beating last quarter, but even though Mr Bruce has had another ratings bump, there hasn’t been that much change at his old home.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the nature of GHR’s network - a mix of small, medium and large stations - has meant there’s a delay for all the figures to flow through. We won’t get the full picture for a whole year. Radio 2, though, reports every quarter, so they took the hit straight away.

This time around it stayed pretty static across the daytime schedule:

Breakfast

A message from my colleague Lloydie James Lloyd, made me ponder the challenges for breakfast shows. Generally a strong breakfast offer finds its share of audience above the station average. For most stations, Breakfast should be the engine that drives the rest of a station forward. Capital Breakfast, across the country has seen its share below the station average for the past year, with this quarter no different. Afternoons and Drive meanwhile, are ahead.

It’s a similar story for Heart, and even though Jamie and Amanda are the biggest commercial radio breakfast show with 3.8 million weekly listeners, its share tracks lower than the station (whilst other dayparts remain ahead).

It’s a similar story with Kiss and Magic, with breakfast under-delivering (though Kiss had a good overall book in London, with a return to over 1m reach - up from 900k last quarter).

Radio 1 and Radio 4 manage it. Radio 2 nearly does. A good commercial example is Mylo and Rosie at Pulse 1 in Bradford/Leeds - a 3.2% share at Breakfast vs the 2.1% average, something they’ve consistently done over the past year.

Back in London, Smooth doesn’t manage it, Nick Ferrari at LBC matches it and my quick look shows only Moyles ahead with his breakfast share at 2.2% vs the station’s 1.6% (it’s similar for his national figures too).

The radio head in me just thinks there’s room in London for a big hitting mainstream show. All the big pop stations have seemingly abandoned stunting, big ideas and any breakfast-related marketing. Are they missing a trick? Both Greg James and Moyles, whilst lacking in much above-the-line attention either, are still putting out big ideas - is this why they’re leading their stations share? Perhaps with Roman Kemp apparently off, there’s an opportunity for a selection of breakfast re-shuffles.

Platform changes…

Bauer’s strategy for GHR to occupy as much FM spectrum as possible has meant the conversion of some of their FM stations, booting their old services to be DAB only. GEM in the East Midlands has just had that treatment, but at the beginning of the year they moved Lincs FM off of FM. This is the first complete survey since the move.

Overall its reach is down to 163k (from 246k pre the change) and hours down from 2,654k to 1,586. But overall I think that’s a good performance given the situation. Looking at the platform breakdowns, DAB is in the lead. But there's significant use of smart speakers too (54k reach).

Smart speakers are a great boon for stations if listeners can remember the name of what they want to listen to (it’s not great for new launches). But in this Lincs FM scenario, a high recall of a heritage brand, a large number of devices in home, and a real reason to use them (the loss of FM) has shown how well they can do.

In other news…

It’s still early days for Global’s re-localisation of Heart and Capital in Central Scotland - but the figures are going in the right direction. Capital’s up from 377k to 384k and Heart from 346k to 380k

Goodbye to Jack FM in Oxford. Its three radio stations go out on a high, with a combined reach of 62k and 380k hours, up on the last quarter. It’s always tough when the end is nigh, but listening to the stations as they merge into GHR, it seems they’ve managed to maintain their personality and focus though what must be a tough situation to work in.

Well done to my team at Fun Kids. We’re in RAJAR, but it doesn’t measure our core audience, only the ones over 10. So we choose to just measure it in London. There, our 10+ listeners - 111k - make us bigger than Scala, Kerang, Kiss Fresh and Heat from Bauer; Smooth Country and Capital Chill from Global, all of Virgin’s spin-offs, talkSPORT2 and GB News as well. A nice result.

Thanks to Hallett Arendt, who produce Octagon, brilliant software that let’s me interrogate the RAJAR figures.

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Google’s forays into podcasting have not gone well. First there was Google Listen, then it was in Google Play Music, then they launched the quite good Google Podcasts. That’s now been scheduled to be sent to the Google Graveyard for internment in September next year. Instead YouTube & YouTube Music will now be the destination for podcasts.

This isn’t even the first time YouTube’s been in the podcasting space, and their involvement has always beguiled podcasters. They’ve consistently been unclear about their podcasting plans, refuse to follow how other listening apps work and they want to take a cut of podcasters’ money too.

However, YouTube does provide a real opportunity to podcasters - they reach a different audience to many existing podcast apps - and can provide a new way to make money. But if you’re a podcaster you’re going to have to make some decisions.

YouTube vs YouTube Music

The first thing to get to grips with is that YouTube and YouTube Music are two different apps. The first is what most people recognise as ‘YouTube’, a video viewing experience. The second is an app more akin to Spotify - bringing together music, music videos and now podcasts. Just like other music apps, there are playlists and you can listen when the app’s in the background (if you subscribe).

YouTube and YouTube Music use the same source for all of their content - regular YouTube channels - with a few special features. Musicians can create special playlists called ‘Releases’ that group together, in old money, Singles and Albums. This provides some extra metadata so YouTube and YouTube Music can better categorise the ‘videos’ that the artist uploads. It’s the same for podcasters with Podcast Playlists.

Wherever you get your podcasts

If you want to get your podcast into YouTube and YouTube Music you should think of your YouTube channel as your content management system. Any regular YouTube channel can house podcasts, you just need to tell YouTube which of your videos are connected to your show.

But before we get to what you upload, lets ask why.

First things first - being on YouTube is necessary to deliver on the promise of the phrase ‘wherever you get your podcasts’.

Podcasters love saying the line ‘wherever you get your podcasts’ but often they’re really just thinking about Apple Podcasts and Spotify. To do it properly to maximise your chance of reaching all listeners you need to be on every podcast app.

James Cridland at Podnews has an incredibly comprehensive list. Is your show on JioSaavn? It’s popular in India and Asia. Are you on TuneIn? It may get your show onto more smart speakers. Being everywhere is a good idea.

In all surveys of podcast users YouTube comes out very high - usually in the top three of podcast apps. OG podcasters may exclaim "‘but how can that be? most podcasts aren’t on YouTube”. That is correct, but there’s a number of big ‘podcasts’ that have come from that world that skew the figures.

Joe Rogan built a big audience by putting his full shows on YouTube. Nowadays it’s just clips. But they’re frequent. And for many of his YouTube subscribers who just watch his clips, they would say they’ve been ‘listening’ to his podcast. At the same time many long-standing YouTubers now have podcasts. They may be available on Spotify or Apple, but it’s no great surprise that lots of their YouTube fans watch their podcasts on YouTube, just like their other videos.

This results in a somewhat skewed perception of a what a podcast is. Podcast originalists may talk about audio and something delivered via RSS, whilst young consumers think of a podcast more of a form of content - people having discussions around a microphone. Many new young podcasters don’t even bother with a traditional podcast app - they’re happy enough to just have their podcasts on YouTube (most of their favourite creators are there anyway).

I tell people that it doesn’t matter what you think a podcast is, you need to consider what your audience thinks one is.

For many listeners, YouTube and YouTube Music are podcast apps, and therefore as such you need to get your shows there otherwise you’ll be missing out on listeners. Wherever you get your podcasts really does mean WHEREVER your listeners get their podcasts.

What should you put on YouTube?

A challenge for many podcasters is wondering what should they upload. For YouTube and YouTube music you have to upload a video rather than audio. An MP4 rather than an MP3. As it’s video you need to think about what you’ll show on the screen.

There are broadly four options.

1. A static image.

2. An audiogram - basically similar to a static image but with some graphical movement.

3. An animated or more visualised version of your episode

4. A TV-style version of your podcast.

A static image video will mean you can jump the first hurdle to get your podcast on YouTube but this is where the difference between YouTube and YouTube Music become apparent.

YouTube vs YouTube Music

As mentioned, one app is about video consumption and the other is about music/audio consumption. Having a static (or lightly visualised) video is fine, mostly, for YouTube Music. The ‘lyric video’ is something similar from the music world. It provides glanceable pictures, but the focus is the soundtrack, for many podcasts it’s similar. YouTube Music is, like Spotify and the like, often used with the screen-off.

The problem though is that what you upload to your YouTube channel goes to both YouTube and YouTube Music.

There’s a much bigger bunch of users who are using YouTube’s video product (on the web, mobile or TV). And these people quite like there to be proper video. YouTube’s discovery algorithm is based around watch time. Successful YouTube videos are great looking, but are also built around keeping users engaged throughout.

Your static image podcast video will not be visually engaging, so it will fall foul of the YouTube algorithm. Your video will be there. But it won’t be surfaced to anyone new.

The NPR podcast Code Switch does alright. It’s around 100 in the News chart on Apple Podcast - it would have tens of thousands of listeners per episode. On YouTube it gets, on average, the low hundreds of views. If you look at the videos they’re just static images. They have jumped the hurdle and made the show available, but there’s little new engagement with the show. It will likely be pretty much invisible to most YouTube users.

NPR’s Fresh Air is a bigger show (Top 50 in the main Apple chart) but it also has a better YouTube experience. Proper cover images, and the videos themselves are more audiogram like. It gets views in the low thousands.

Finally its podcast Louder Than A Riot (not troubling any Apple podcasts chart at the moment) is audiogram-based but it lives on the NPR Music YouTube channel (home of Tiny Desk Concerts and more) - and over 8 million subscribers. It does 10k to 20k an episode.

My team at Podcast Discovery work with US podcasters Crooked Media on many of the visual elements of Pod Save the UK alongside UK production company Reduced Listening. For that show podcast video is an important part of the offering. But Crooked’s original podcast - Pod Save America (a top 50 US podcast) does very well on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of views per episode.

To do this it takes a much more YouTube native approach. A big focus on thumbnail art and fully produced video episodes. It’s creating output that does well in both the YouTube world and the YouTube Music world.

A final example is the New York Times’ The Daily, one of the biggest podcasts in the world (in 2020 it was doing 2 million an episode and it’s top 3 in the US). On YouTube it’s doing less than 20k an ep with a static image.

Does that mean I have to do full video like Pod Save America?

Well, it depends. If your aim is to just get your show into YouTube so existing subscribers can find it, then no. Following the NPR/NYT examples above shows that those static videos will be enough to be listed. But to grow an audience, be discoverable, and prosper on YouTube then you need to focus on the things that make regular YouTube videos do well - good thumbnails, engaging titles, solid descriptions and engaging, high-quality video. Ideally on an existing well-used channel.

Setting up your podcast on your YouTube channel

Okay, so you’ve decided what kind of video you’re going to upload, how do you get it onto YouTube?

Firstly you need a YouTube Channel. If you don’t have one, those are free to create.

Then you need to create a podcast playlist. Log into studio.youtube.com for your YouTube channel and select the + Create button at the top of the page. This will show you a few options:

Unsurprisingly you select the final option that probably shows you these two things:

In YouTube parlance, a ‘podcast’ is really just a special playlist. If you select the first option it creates a playlist that looks very much like the regular ones you see in YouTube except you associate it with your podcast ‘square’ image. It also tells the YouTube back-end to list your show in the ‘podcasts’ section of YouTube Music. If you select the second option you can convert an existing playlist that already has your podcast episodes videos in.

Some people though, when they select the New Podcast button will see a slightly different list, with a third option:

The ‘Submit RSS feed’ gives you the option of pasting in your podcast’s regular RSS feed address. If you do this YouTube will grab your audio (in the same way Apple or Spotify) do, turn it into a video - with a static image - and then upload it to one of their special podcast playlists.

The reason not everyone sees this is that YouTube are gradually rolling it out to channels, but it’ll get to everyone eventually.

So, is this the perfect solution for people wanting to just jump that first hurdle? Well, no.

YouTube want their cut

If you go to submit your RSS feed to YouTube it provides this guidance:

In other words if your RSS feed contains spot advertising then you’re not permitted to submit it. If you just have host-read ads then you’re fine.

This is problematic for the vast majority of shows. Most podcast hosts (Acast, Audioboom etc) give creators one RSS feed that they then go and submit to the likes of Apple and Spotify. This includes the content but also the dynamic advertising that pays for it.

These are feeds that YouTube doesn’t want. Why? Well, it sells spot advertising itself. Its rules (for all videos) are that you can’t sell any advertising types that it already sells. Like 30 second spot ads. It’s also why they allow host-reads, as that’s not something they can directly duplicate.

This raises (at least) two problems. First for many creators even if they wanted to give an ad-free RSS feed to Spotify they don’t have one, as their host doesn’t provide it.

Secondly, do you want YouTube to have an ad-free version of your podcast? Maybe that’s what you offer to paying subscribers? Or perhaps you don’t want to move people from listening with ads on Spotify to not hearing them on YouTube - thus depriving you of revenue.

Of course, what YouTube wants you to do is provide an ad-free version, and then use its own YouTube advertising to replace your ads with their ads (where they keep half the money). This is dependent on you having enough views, subscribers and watch time to be able to join their advertising scheme (generally 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year).

But this raises a question of the deal you have with your existing podcast advertising partner. You may not have the rights to do a supplementary deal with YouTube.

My team at Fun Kids use Omny to do our podcast ad-insertion. And excellent they are too. In fact they give us an ad-free feed for all of our shows that we use for our subscription service Fun Kids Podcasts+. We could use that feed to service YouTube. But that would strip out all ads including our host-read ones. Like most people we use the ad-insertion technology to do spot ads and live reads. So really from Omny I now need three feeds - with all ads, with only live reads, and then no ads at all.

The arrival of YouTube and their rules will mean that all hosts will likely have to spend time and money revising their systems to provide all the different options creators might need to work with YouTube.

The other reason YouTube hasn’t decided to make an exception for spot advertising in podcasts is because of the challenges of pass-through.

If you submit your show to most apps, they include your podcast in their directory. But when you hit play it pulls the (generally) MP3 file from your hosting company’s servers. This is good for podcasters as your host inserts the relevant ads in a split second and then delivers it to a listener. This means someone in London, UK gets a different ad to someone in London, Ontario Canada.

When YouTube turns your MP3 into an MP4 it gets your audio once and produces a video file based on that. Canadian or British users will get the same content. There’s no way for YouTube to ‘pass through’ different ads or other content to their video viewers.

So what’s the best way to service YouTube?

Right now I think the best way to service YouTube is to, disappointingly, upload your videos manually to the podcast playlist. This means using some software to convert your MP3s to MP4s, but it then gives you the flexibility on how the videos look and also what advertising they include.

In Summary

The very long length of this blog post I think highlights what a pain it is for podcasters to get on YouTube. Both strategically and practically.

To do YouTube well means that podcasters will have to change their work flows and monetisation efforts to benefit from the platform. Why bother at all? Well back to my earlier point about the phrase ‘wherever you get your podcasts’. Consumers, particularly younger ones, will expect your show to be on YouTube and YouTube Music.

The optimal strategy for podcasting on YouTube is to create full-video versions of your podcasts, with proper attention paid to thumbnails, titles and descriptions, uploaded manually, with live-reads burned in to the video and then opting in to YouTube’s ad network. This maximises revenue and drives awareness and sample through discovery.

The minimum you should do is ensure that (within the rules) your full podcast episodes are uploaded (manually or dynamically) so listeners who seek you out can find and listen to you.

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AOB

• A good Media Podcast this week with LBC’s Iain Dale and Broadcast’s Rebecca Cooney. Listen or watch (on YouTube!).

• I was also Matthew of the Week on Matt Chorley’s Times Radio show/Red Box Podcast talking about media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict with the excellent Manveen Rana.

• Check out more details about the Podcast Growth Summit on 30th November.

Audio news from Australia, as the largest radio group - ARN - has made a bid for the 2nd largest - SCA.

The regulatory issues are particularly focused on the ownership restrictions in Metro markets, where any operator can only own two stations. At the moment in Sydney for example, SCA operates FM stations Triple M and 2DayFM (Hit Network) and ARN run WSFM (Gold network) and KIIS 1065.

So as part of the detail ARN have teamed up with a private equity firm - Anchorage Capital Partners - to acquire SCA and divvy up the assets.

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For ARN - they would retain the KIIS network and many of their regional radio stations and would merge in the Triple M network of 5 Metro stations alongside 51 of SCA’s regional stations.

For ACP - They would acquire the 3 Metro stations and 10 regional radio stations that ARN would need to dispose of to stay within the rules. They would also acquire, from SCA, 5 Metro stations (the Hit Network) and 25 other regional stations. They would also take ownership of SCA’s TV operation plus their digital business.

In radio terms - it looks like the KIIS and Triple M networks to ARN and the Hit and Gold network to ACP. It is also likely the existing SCA technical operation would form the basis of the ‘new’ ACP media business.

In the documents it also talks about ARN and ACP putting together their digital audio businesses into a new joint venture. This, it seems, would be SCA’s Listnr operation alongside the activity around ARN’s iHeartRadio business. In Australia ARN licence US company’s iHeart podcast tech/app platform. They then have an owned and operated digital audio content/advertising operation as well as partnering and repping a number of other shows.

Not mentioned is what would happen with national advertising and whether there’s opportunities (or a desire) to sell that together.

From the outside, this definitely looks like an opportunity to streamline the legacy audio business and build scale for a digital audio one.

For ARN, working with a company like Anchorage offers lots of opportunities. In the short term it helps them become the business they want to be, and gives them a strategic alliance with the number two competitor.

In the medium term it may also position ARN well to do further deals with Anchorage if any media regulation changes.

Anchorage themselves, will want to make a return on their investment - which in the short term means a likely reorganisation of the remainder of SCA.

In the UK, a not dissimilar deal happened when Global sold a number of its stations to a friendly buyer in Communicorp. They operate local advertising and production of their radio station separately to Global. However the brands Communicorp put their stations under and the national advertising contract are owned and operated by Global.

This is definitely not the end of the Australian story as the two companies haggle over the deal (or indeed anyone else comes along to interrupt their party).

Have you been forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe for free and get more audio discussion into your inbox…

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AOB

• On The Media Podcast this week I spoke to Paul Robinson and Newsweek’s Alex Hudson about Newsnight, Netflix and more. Listen here. Watch here.

• I’m looking forward to the Podcast Growth Summit on Thurs 30th November (earlybird pricing until the 4th November).

Edison Research has released the first edition of Edison Podcast Metrics UK, its attempt to provide a chart that benchmarks the reach of all of the UK’s podcasts.

There are a number of ‘podcast rankers’ around the world - these usually bring together a number of the main networks who share their download data with a third party who publish the data. The challenge with these rankers is that not everyone participates. In the Australian ranker, for example, Spotify and the ABC don’t (currently) take part. So whilst it gives a lot of data, it’s not complete.

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In the UK we don’t have a centralised ranker. RAJAR have looked at it, as have some other people, but they haven’t been able to get all the participants to agree.

In the US, as well as the Triton ranker, Edison Research created their own chart, but with some different methodology. Instead of taking the download data from the networks, they just did a big survey that asked listeners what podcasts they’re listening to. This way you don’t need to get networks to buy in, or provide data. The results are the ranker includes any podcast made by any network. Here’s their recent US data.

But surely the download-based rankers are more accurate? Well, perhaps not. They include data from every episode downloaded but it can’t tell whether anyones listened to that file. I’m sure we all have a load of shows that have been downloaded to our podcast app but not listened to. Measuring downloads also means you can’t tell if multiple people have tuned in - a family listening in a car for example.

With survey-based research, like the Edison one, you’re asking people what they can remember they’ve listened to. Whilst comprehensive - it will catalogue any show mentioned - the main challenge is the sample size. Can you reach enough people to provide a comprehensive overview?

The current release of the UK data says they interviewed 2,273 people from April 2023 to June 2023, a three month period, so I imagine circa 200 people a week.

As well as the main chart they’ve released, subscribers will also be able to access broader demographic breakdowns and network-reach numbers.

I’ve always been pretty fascinated by this sort of exercise. My corporate radio career involved lots of research - both quantitative and qualitative - and I’ve been thinking about podcast data for quite a long time.

Indeed, when me and Matt Hill ran the British Podcast Awards, we had a go at creating our own UK podcast ranker at the beginning of 2021.

We worked with research company Kantar and spoke to around 9,000 people to find 3,000 podcast listeners over 12 weeks. Back then our Top 5 was:

1. The Joe Rogan Experience

2. BBC Friday Night Comedy

3. Happy Hour Podcast (Jaack Mate)

4. That Peter Crouch Podcast (BBC)

5. Shagged Married Annoyed

It was a fascinating exercise and quite a complicated one. We also spent quite a lot of money on it. Our attempt was to see whether we could create perhaps a weekly or monthly chart. As you can maybe tell, it wasn’t something that we ended up launching!

The key challenge was the sample size and the long-tail nature of podcasting. Now, the shows up the top of the list definitely passed the smell test. Did I, as a podcast expert, think that looked like the biggest shows? Sure. Even better, the demographic data looked pretty resilient too. Our problem was that as you went down the list the data started to look a little more wobbly. There were only a few shows that had hundreds of our respondents listening. Our top show - Joe Rogan - only had a reach of 5% of the audience. Pretty quickly we were into just tens of people saying they tune in. Overall, we felt it would be hard to provide something comprehensive to the sector, so we went back to the drawing board.

Now I have a lot of time for Edison Research. They’re easily one of the best audio research companies in the world, and nice people as well. They will have been much better than us at doing the research. So lets look at what they’ve come up with. Their ‘top 25’ is as follows.

This definitely passes the ‘smell test’. I could absolutely believe they were the top 25 shows in the UK.

The challenge is that there are charts that we do all see in podcasting - that’s the Apple and Spotify ones - where even though we know that the algorithm is designed to reflect changes in popularity, rather than total downloads, it does skew our perception slightly.

The fact the Edison research measures recall - shows that listeners can remember what they’ve tuned into - and also means that it will be skewed towards the more popular, memorable shows. If I asked you to name the podcasts you follow in your app, how many could you remember? Five’s probably do-able. Could you list 10? If you read this newsletter then you probably follow many more.

Update: Megan from Edison dropped me a note about this:

When respondents are asked to list the podcasts they’ve listened to in the past week, they are also asked to consider all the places they consume them (e.g. apps, services, social media, websites, YouTube). They are then given extensive instructions on how to access their listening histories to ensure the list is as comprehensive as possible. It is a multi-step process to collect responses from study participants.

There’s also some interesting things around names. Friday Night Comedy doesn’t appear in the list - but then do people refer to the shows on it, like Dead Ringers or The News Quiz? The BBC shows they include are roughly in the order of the BBC’s data for the same quarter - though Edison picks up shows like Moneybox and Infinite Monkey Cage that don’t seem to trouble the BBC’s own downloads-based chart.

This, of course, is one of the issues - the methodology is different so you wouldn’t expect the same results.

Similarly comparing some of the shows that are hosted by Acast - Off Menu, Shagged Married Annoyed, That Peter Crouch Podcast, The Therapy Crouch, Happy Place and Newlyweds - the order is pretty close when comparing the actual UK downloads Acast tells its advertisers. However it misses some that, based on downloads, you would expect to see - Guardian Football Weekly, The High Performance Podcast - that rank higher than some of those listed.

Now who’s to say these didn’t appear in places 26-30? Again, the methodology is different to measuring downloads.

Weekly reach is also very different to total downloads from a show. Today in Focus, from the Guardian, has as similar weekly reach to Newlyweds (though doesn’t make the list above) but, with five episodes a week, it does nearly five times the total downloads. The latter is clearly a ‘bigger’ show, but, once again, it depends how you measure it.

Finally, the chart data combines the recall of three months of respondents. This definitely means it will lean into shows that run all year round. There’s, in effect, 12 opportunities to capture people mentioning a show. If you’re only a six part series, you might be one of the most popular shows for a short period of time, but you may miss out on a chart placement.

Summary

So, is the Edison Research chart a comprehensive list of the top 25 shows in the country? No. Is it a pretty good approximation? Yes. But you need to remember what’s being measured.

AOB

• In this week’s Media Podcast, I catch up with Charlotte Tobitt, Editor of Press Gazette and Chris Lockery, Editor of Popbitch to talk about Russell Brand, Rupert Murdoch and more. Listen here. Watch here.

• I’m looking forward to speaking at Podnews Live this Wednesday where I’m going to be talking about what makes a Top 200 show. I’m also at the, now sold out, British Podcast Awards on Thursday. Do say hello if you see me at either.

• If you want more on the Edison Research study, Adam Bowie’s written about it too.

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