last highlighted date: 2024-11-08
Highlights
- The only thing I’m (fairly) certain of is what medium played a pivotal role, for the first time, in young people’s decision to violently pivot to Trump: podcasts. And that’s what this post is about.
- New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.
- the audience on the pods is not only exponentially bigger, but also much more valuable (i..e, younger, more male, and more persuadable).
- People listen to pods to learn; they watch cable TV to sanctify what they already believe. The former is (much) more appealing to candidates and advertisers.
- Rogan’s demographic is 80% male, 93% under 54, and 56% under 34. Men under 34 are the Great White Rhinos of advertising, the most valuable beast in the consumer jungle, and they’re increasingly difficult to find
- The average listener to my ProfG podcast is 35, male, and makes about $150k a year. This is an audience I sometimes — affectionately! — call stupid. They have disposable incomes and are in the meeting-and-mating years, meaning they’re prone to buying all kinds of high-margin stuff to try to increase their sexual attractiveness.
- The calculus is simple math: Just as newspapers lost relevance to Google and Meta, cable news is losing relevance to podcasts.
- We have transitioned from a fossil-fuel-based economy to an attention economy, full stop. If you command attention, revenue will follow
- Note: The best-performing tech IPO of 2024 is the fourth-most-trafficked site in the U.S., yet the company was valued at only $5.7b when it debuted on the Nasdaq seven months ago. Since then the market cap of Reddit (Nasdaq: RDDT) is up 274%
- only ad-supported medium growing as fast as Meta, TikTok, Alphabet, and (now) Reddit is podcasting. Podcasting revenue grew 18% this year, similar to Alphabet (15%) and Meta (17%).
- I believe podcast revenue is going to grow faster than that of every other digital platform, with the possible exception of TikTok.
- When people approach me in the wild, it’s easy to discern where they’ve been exposed to my content. A high five and some bro-ey banter, video. If they greet me like a friend they haven’t seen in a while, podcast.
- Broadcasters sink a lot of capital into state-of-the-art studios, satellite trucks, transmitters, fiber optic cables, people, etc. Podcasts don’t need any of that stuff. That capex was a moat that created leverage for the networks and their shareholders, who captured most of the medium’s profits. They controlled the means of production. The moat’s now been crossed
- A decent TV studio can easily run $400k.
- There is little sustainable enterprise value in a podcast company; what matters isn’t capex or infrastructure, it’s talent. That’s why a lot of individual podcasters are getting rich, but not a lot of podcast company shareholders.
- Low capex means the profits can be enormous once a podcaster covers the costs of producing two pods a week (e.g., two or three producers and a part-time sound engineer).
- Prof G podcast portfolio (Prof G, Prof G Markets, Raging Moderates) will register 2025 revenue of approximately 1m+ per employee. Pivot, the podcast I co-host with Kara Swisher, does more revenue, with even fewer resources. (Note: Vox, our distribution partner, is responsible for ad sales.)
- The political power of podcasting is only beginning to be felt. This election was supposed to be a referendum on bodily autonomy: It wasn’t. Historically, the candidate who raises the most money wins: She didn’t. In each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium: He did. By far the most potent media weapon this time was podcasting.
