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The curious case of audiobooks vs. podcasts & lessons for podcasters
Last December Deloitte published its Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Predictions 2020 and inside you can find a lot of useful data. I was struck by the comparison of global revenue numbers of audiobooks and podcasts.
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The Deloitte report is pretty comprehensive and has a lot of chapters, the one I am addressing below is on The rise of audiobooks and podcasting.
The report says:
Although the United States in 2018 had 60 percent more podcast listeners than audiobook listeners (21 percent of Americans for podcasts versus 13 percent for audiobooks), podcast revenues for that year were roughly 33 percent lower than for audiobooks (US$500 million compared with US$750 million). This means that each audiobook listener generates more than 2.4 times the annual revenue of a podcast listener. And it isn’t just audiobooks that podcasts lag behind when it comes to monetization. In the United Kingdom in 2017, commercial radio generated 2.8 pence of ad spend per hour of listening, while podcasts generated just 0.5 pence.
In 2019, according to Pew Research, 20% of Americans listened to audiobooks compared to 32% who have listened to a podcast in the last 12 months (per The Infinite Dial 2019 by Edison Research).
OK, now look at the data below 📊
You are looking at predictions, those numbers aren’t real, yet, but podcasting is expected this year (2020) to become a billion-dollar industry worldwide.
Audiobooks will become three times bigger in terms of revenue, even with 2/3 of the userbase podcasts have. Turns out those fewer users are happy to pay from $20 to $30 per audiobook or subscribe for $10 per month.
