The Biggest Opportunity for Podcasters Right Now, According to Experts
Spotting the right opportunity at the right time has the potential to make a huge difference to your podcast. A major benefit of being a nimble indie podcaster rather than working with networks is that you can pivot and try out new things whenever you want — and with minimal risk.
A while ago, we polled independent podcasters to find out how they discovered their biggest ‘aha!’ moment in podcasting, and the majority reported that it was through ‘trial and error’.
With this in mind, I thought I’d use my time at The Podcast Show in London last week to dig for some new ‘aha!’s to share with you lot.
I cornered the people who live and breathe the podcasting space daily— podcast consultants, network producers, and platform executives —to ask them one simple question:
What’s the biggest opportunity for independent podcasters in the next 12 months?
And here’s what the industry experts are betting on.
Edward Brauer at Podcast AI
“I think the biggest opportunity for podcasters is automating their workflows and dubbing into other languages. That way, they can break into new markets and scale themselves in a way they haven’t been able to up until now.
This is like the farming revolution: the tractor just came out and anybody who can get their hands on a tractor will have their output multiplied. This is the time to scale up.”
Carl Hartley at the University of Leeds
“I think there’s a massive opportunity for podcasts to be used within education, helping students and to even be used in schools. Companies that support educators to create interesting, well-produced podcasts are opening up a whole new opportunity for people in podcasting to get involved.
People who produce podcasts can partner with educators to help them make those podcasts, make them sound professional and engage those students and pupils a lot more.”
Mike Russell at Creator Magic
“The biggest opportunity right now is 100% AI.
You shouldn’t be thinking about your first 10 episodes and scripting those out yourself. You should be jamming back and forth with AI and this should allow you to do 2 or 3 times more work with the same kind of knowledge base.
Maybe you’re great with audio, but you’re not so good with the graphic design. Now you can use tools like Mid-journey or OpenAI’s chatGPT-4 image generator to create your podcast artwork. Or if you’re on YouTube (which you should be), you can use AI to create your thumbnails and split-test those thumbnails.
It’s about using AI to give you superpowers. Delegate all the non-spoken-audio stuff: Transcribe those episodes, feed them to AI, get summaries, find ways to promote on social media. It can do it all for us now.”
Ronald Young Jr at ohitsbigRon Studios
“There’s an opportunity for folks to self-actualize: create the show, make the show from end to end, and directly interact with your audience in a way that continues to sustain the show. I think that’s the only way to truly make something that lasts.
Make sure it’s a fully realized idea, that it has a name, and that you can see it through many episodes. Also that you have the time to work on it yourself because there’s no dream scenario in which 13 people come in and help you make the show every week. It might just be you for a long time.”
Clayton M Coke at The Cash Flow Show
“For me, the biggest opportunity for podcasters right now would be combining video and audio. Of course, a podcast that includes cameras starts to get expensive and time consuming. But I think if podcasters can get even a short video of a couple of minutes, they can use that to lift their podcast visibility. Younger people want video and they’re the ones who share on social media.”
Danny Brown at Captivate
“Managing your own ad input. So for a lot of indie podcasters, advertisers don’t want to work with you because you don’t have a lot of downloads. But now, there are platforms that allow you to manage your own ad inventory.
You determine which advertisers and sponsors you’ll work with and sponsors are starting to see that working directly with smaller shows can be more effective than the big shows because they might have a small download number, but they’ve got a higher ratio of engaged listeners.
For indies who want to make a living off podcasts, there’s a big opportunity there to become your own ad buyer, ad seller, sponsor buyer, sponsor seller.”
Jeremy Enns at Podcast Marketing Academy
“I think a lot of indie shows – especially small businesses that are using podcasts as a content channel – tend to approach podcasting as a content distribution platform.
Show descriptions will say “I talk to experts about this.” But that’s not really a show. That’s a collection of content. They don’t really think about what the show concept or premise is. I think the opportunity is in thinking: “What is the show?”
There’s a huge opportunity for people to not only have really compelling, engaging episodes, but that they’re nested under this umbrella of a really compelling show, where you don’t need to read the episode list to get hooked.
When you look at a book cover and think, “Wow, I need to read that book,” you haven’t even read a page yet but you’re already bought in on the premise. The same goes for a TV series. You don’t judge it based on the episode titles, but the premise.
I think more indie creators need to be thinking like that; about the show level, the concept, the premise. If you can get that right, I think all of your marketing becomes 10 times easier.“
Dan Kendall at Health Podcast Network
“I think it’s a really important time right now where people need to own their relationship with their audience. We’re seeing players like Netflix coming into podcasting, Spotify adding video, Apple trying to up its game in a variety of ways. Those are all channels that are taking the direct person-to-person contact away from the creator directly to their audience.
So it’s more important than ever to make sure that you have opportunities and ways to try to drive those listeners directly to your email list and to your social profiles so you can develop that relationship. That’s the biggest opportunity I think people need to make sure they embrace over the next 12 months.“
Michelle at The Podcast Academy
“I think that in the next 12 months, we’re going to see a lot of international expansion of podcasting as the globe is brought together in a digital way. Certainly podcasting is starting to get more visibility. That’s why we put on the Ambies – to help bring attention to podcasting. And shows like The Podcast Show in London really help to ensure that people all over the world can not only learn more about podcasting, but have a chance to level up their own work.”
Veronique Duong at Narastoria
“Podcasting is the new media of this era – where you can be very creative and you don’t have limits. But I believe the podcast industry has many things to do in terms of tuning parts. Improving podcast search optimization (PSO) – how podcasters track their organic traffic, for example – will be very important in the next few years, I believe.”
Naomi Simon at A1 Content Studios
“I think it’s probably in production and script in terms of AI. There are lots of technologies at the moment that will spot your ‘uhms’ and automatically take them out. You can train bots in your brand voice, and it will give you scripts so you don’t have to do as much thinking as you once did.
In some cases, you don’t actually need to turn up because you can show your Heygen avatar that looks exactly like you and it can podcast for you. I think soon, a lot of podcast influencers won’t actually be real people. There will be personas created by a person behind the camera and you may or may not know.”
Ana Ratala at RedCircle
“I think monetization is still an area that a lot of podcasters still don’t understand or haven’t tapped into yet. There are great opportunities to work with amazing brands and deliver amazing campaigns and I think this is something that every podcaster should try and tap into. It’s important that podcasters develop their skills in a way that gives them more opportunity to do that.”
Pete Donaldson at Stak
“I think there’s a real derth of non-right-wing content out there in the man-or-woman-in-front-of-a-microphone-on-YouTube kind of space. I think some kind of free-thinking, slightly more liberal voices might do very well in the current moment.
These kinds of people might have their flowers in the next 4 or 5 years because there are opportunities there to flood the space with some different thinking.”
Louise Lambert at Reviewed and Cleared
“I think we need to look for the female Joe Rogan. There are lots of male hosts out there and I think there’s space for more non-wellbeing, topical podcast with female hosts.”
Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to chat to us at The Podcast Show this year. This wasn’t the only question we asked, either – check out whether we should be striving to protect spoken word audio for more industry analysis, opinions, and hot takes!
