Today, only a handful of the elite podcasters get money for their unique content. Even though sponsors often times pay a cost per listener to advertise on their podcast, and look at how big their reach is. But whose fault is it? While reading this, I recommend you play Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star and replace “video killed” with “podcast saved”.

One reason many sponsors give to why they only sponsor the elite is that it’s too time-consuming to sponsor small and medium-sized podcasts. That’s why then often times set the minimum of listeners at 50.000.

But whose fault is this? There are pretty much four actors in the industry we can talk about:

  1. The sponsors
  2. The podcast listening platforms
  3. Podcasters
  4. Media companies/sponsor platforms

This is how I see it. You could say, Vargas truth.

Is it the sponsor’s fault? Not really, since it’s been true until now with what they say with the time it takes to find, reach out and negotiate prices with many podcasters. Even though they are well aware that many smaller podcasters have a good relationship and very high trustability with their listeners since they many times know them in real life or the listener actively found their podcast.

Then it must be the podcast platforms? Well, they are much to blame for the discovery part, so in a way yes. They make it harder for some podcasts to grow and keep the elite at the top, almost like an old monarchy society where the rules are rigged to keep the elite in power for a long time. But they don’t really control why the sponsor market looks like it does.

So the podcasters themselves is at fault? That’s a huge burden to put on podcasters. We can’t really expect hundreds of thousands of podcasts to be able to find sponsors who want to sponsor just 1 small podcast, that won’t work in most cases. Also, that would take too much time for podcasters to be a to get enough money to make the sponsor search worth it.

Media companies/Sponsor platforms. In my opinion, they are to blame. When podcasting got bigger, so did the interest to make a profit out of podcasters work. But the companies who got interested seemed to come in with the idea that the old obsolete radio model will work on podcasts. But there is a problem with that. Podcasting is not radio, that’s why it’s growing so fast. Podcasts don’t need to be on a certain channel at a certain time point. They can be on many listening platforms at the same time, be listened to whenever and wherever on-demand. They don’t need to have a media empire to help them produce or create content and it’s by the people for the people. We can see many of these companies who focus on bigger podcasts with the old obsolete radio model. Not only on the podcasts they have on their platforms but also the dynamic ad system they focus on where the ads are changed over time. Podcasts lose a key characteristic strength with this, the hosts own read-up of the ads and to keep it the way it was created. Holding on to an old model might be why some of these companies lose tens of millions of dollars each year. Podcasts are about the grassroots, the creators. This is a new medium with hundreds of thousands of podcasters that needs a new model.

This is a fundamental flaw in how the market has approached the new and fast-growing industry. Podcasts aren’t radio, you don’t need to sponsor the big shows one by one or use big media empires to handle your sponsorship or podcast. There is no reason for sponsors not to sponsor small and medium-sized podcasts if they can. That’s why we created Podmosphere’s open mass-sponsor platform where sponsors can sponsor as many podcasts as they wish with just a few clicks. Without an agent picking podcasts for you and adding big overheads so you only can focus on the elite. Oddly the market has focused only on the elite and forgotten about the roots of the industry. The creative podcast creators who create content, not always too big audiences but still have listeners who love their work of art.

Podcast started off as an amateur platform where everybody could create and publish their content. You didn’t need an editor in chief or a media behemoth. People from all around the world record, edit (sometimes), and published their content so listeners could listen to the content whenever and wherever they want. The citizen journalism in the audio space was created and has since then grown exponentially.

The advertisements in podcasts have come with the growth and become the main financial compensation for podcasters, at the top (not the 97%). But we believe there is a podcast revolution coming and Podmosphere is the catalyst that will ignite the spark.