The mighty podcast has had a renaissance over the past decade. Live recordings fill the Royal Albert Hall, the Sydney Opera House and Madison Square Gardens – and that’s just My Dad Wrote A Porno. Just this week it was announced that the Pulitzer Prize Board is adding a new category for audio reporting: you can now win a Pulitzer for podcasting.

As we enter a new era of podcasting, Bazaar look back at those that have defined the past decade.

9 Podcasts That Have Shaped The Decade

It is well-known that podcasting is huge these days. But you might not realize how many educational podcasts are out there.

By educational, we mean shows that focus on some super-focused topic, like a specific period of history or an academic discipline. For instance, there are at least 15 or 20 active podcasts about linguistics, and there are several podcasts out there about conversational Latin (and we were pretty sure that was a dead language that was no longer spoken).

A Podcast for Every Discipline? The Rise of Educational Audio

The U.S. podcast market has been on the rise for years, but 2019 marked an extraordinary year of growth for the space.

At least 90 million U.S. consumers (27% of the population) listen to podcasts monthly, up 23% from 73 million in 2018, which is an acceleration from the 9% year-over-year growth monthly podcast listening experienced last year, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital.

Top 19 Media Trends of 2019: The Podcast Boom

Last month, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that there will now be a Pulitzer for audio reporting, further proving that podcasting has become an unignorable cultural force. In the announcement, Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy explained that the renaissance of audio journalism in recent years has given rise to an extraordinary array of non-fiction storytelling.

Investigative podcasts are exploding. Here are six great ones to get you started.

As 2019 moves to a close, Spotify is giving its yearly version of the personalized Spotify Wrapped, as well as a unique one that showcases your listening records through the last decade.

That indicates your Wrapped will add the songs, artists, albums, and podcasts you found on Spotify in 2019, plus the artists you streamed across the past decade, by a My Decade Wrapped option.

Spotify Wrapped extends to add your favorite music from the decade, plus podcaster metrics

On a recent rainy afternoon, a panel featuring a mixture of hip young creatives took place at YouTube’s Manhattan studio space. The topic of discussion? Podcasting. Organized by New York-based podcast hosting platform Simplecast, the event drew a crowd of young creators with a hunger to learn how to produce and distribute their own podcasts.

How Podcasting Became the Next Content Medium Race

Vox Media Podcast Network now generates over $10 million a year in revenue from a roster of more than 200 shows across Voxs 14 brands, including those produced with partners like Stitcher. While president of Vox Media Studios Marty Moe would not disclose revenue figures, he said the goal is to double the eight-figure revenue business. This would mean a minimum of $20 million in 2020. In all, Vox Media worked with over 100 different podcast advertisers last year and he said he expects this number to grow this year, although the focus is on expanding hit podcasts.

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Podcasts are growing; we are all going to make millions, get on it, quick! This seems to be the general consensus at the minute.

Now, I can understand the excitement, I’m excited too. A passionate, engaged audience, an intimate environment, niche targeting opportunities; it’s hard not to be interested. So, it’s absolutely no surprise that 75% of brands expect to spend big in the podcast realm this year.

How you do it is the important thing. Fundamentally, you have two options - either to advertise in the space or make your own branded podcast.

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Podcasting has enormous potential for publishers, given the mobile portability of the format and the possibility of converting text content into a spoken-word format listeners can consume while doing other activities. The IAB estimated the podcasting advertising market in the United States may exceed $1 billion by next year, a tenfold increase since 2015.

That estimate is encouraging, but podcasting needs to catch up to the needs of sponsors to become more viable amid a crowded media marketplace.

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Chasing industry trends, iHeart Media is about to become the latest audio company to release a custom ad network. Executives say iHeartPodcast AdSuite will tempt brands and potential partners—and set the company apart from its competitors—with a unique array of ad formats across platforms and custom tools.

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Podcast listeners make for an interesting audience segment for B2B brands. According to recent reports on podcasting, 74% of podcast listeners want to learn new things, and they are more likely to be active on social media and follow companies. That means podcasts pose a unique opportunity to generate qualified leads and brand advocates.

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Like blogs and social media, podcasts are democratizing the way people share their thoughts with the world, with the episodic audio series continuing to gain traction with listeners seeking both entertainment value and educational dialogue.

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Seventy-five percent of Americans aged 12 and older (about 212 million people) are now familiar with podcasting, up from 70 percent in 2019. Fifty-five percent (155 million) listen to podcasts in general while 37 percent (104 million people) listen to podcasts monthly, up from 32 percent (90 million) in 2019.

It is more important than ever that brands create content easily retrievable through voice as consumption of both podcasts and voice-operated assistants rise. Over six in ten Americans use some form of voice assistant technology and nearly one-third of smart speaker owners have three or more devices in their homes.

Other noteworthy survey findings include smartphone ownership growing to 240 million, smart speaker awareness growing to about 220 million and smart speaker ownership growing to 76 million. The mean number of smart speakers per household grew from 1.7 in 2018 to 2.2 in 2020. As smart speaker ownership increased, radio ownership decreased, as the mean number of radios per household went from three in 2008 to 1.5 in 2020.

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FEDERATED MEDIA has launched a podcast division, including a podcast network as well as production and marketing services, with 46 podcasts at launch, including original shows, branded podcasts, and repurposed radio content.

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The podcasting industry was shaken up this week with the announcement that JRE is moving exclusively to Spotify and it looks like it has caught Apple’s attention.

Bloomberg reports that Apple is looking to increase its investment in original podcasts, as well as buying existing ones, to augment its nascent Apple TV+ service. While its easy to view this as a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, Apple seems to view podcasts as either a by-product of video content or as material that could then be adapted to video.

Apple effectively invented the podcast format, which derives its name from the pioneering iPod digital audio player, but the pre-eminence of iTunes as a podcasting platform is under serious threat thanks to this recent development. You have to assume Joe Rogan (pictured) spoke to Apple before recently committing to Spotify, so it would be fascinating to know what led him to ultimately reject it.

Over the last 18 months, Spotify has been pushing to expand its platform from a music-streaming service to all types of audio. Podcasting has been a major focus, and led CEO Daniel Ek to acquire companies like Gimlet, Anchor, Parcast, and The Ringer, as well as sign exclusive contracts with big names like the Obamas.

Spotifys latest deal could accelerate the growth of its podcast audience. The Joe Rogan Experience is coming to Spotify, and will be exclusive to the platform by the end of the year. That is a big blow to Apple, which sports the most popular podcast listening app.

After Spotifys recent string of podcasting deals, it is kind of weird to see a podcast acquisition where Spotify is not involved. E.W. Scripps has been shopping around its Stitcher podcast platform for a couple of weeks, and it looks like it found a buyer in SiriusXM.

Sirius will pay around $300 million for the unit. That is a hefty return for Scripps. It originally bought Stitcher in 2016 for $4.5 million, combining it with its $50 million Midroll Media acquisition from the year before.

Still, $300 million is a good deal for the premium podcast platform, a specialized podcast advertising network doing sales for over 300 podcasts, and the owner of two podcast content networks, Earwolf and Stitcher Podcasts.

That compares to Spotifys acquisition of The Ringer earlier this year, for which it reportedly paid between $141 million to $196 million.

In 2018, businesses spent $497 million on podcast advertising in 2018, and it’s estimated that by 2020, podcast ad spend will go up to a whopping $1 billion. So, podcasting is clearly big business.

How do you launch a business podcast?
So, there are a few steps when it comes to launching a podcast for your business – and it all starts with thinking about your aim.

What are you trying to achieve from your podcast? Is it to build trust with customers, or to drive more awareness with new prospects? In my case, I wanted to better position myself as a leader in the sales enablement space – so in addition to my blog over at Contemsa and posting on LinkedIn, I wanted to have a few different streams of content where my audience could gain insights about sales enablement.

With that aim in mind, it was important that my podcast was not about selling anything. Instead, it was about sharing insights and tips on B2B sales enablement topics such as How to Involve Sales Teams in Your Sales Playbook Process, for example. As you can see in this example episode, I am not selling anything: I am giving away useful tips and support for my customers and prospects.

Podcasting is increasingly seen as a reliable channel for long-term ad investments, new data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows: Annual ad buys, where ads are bought for the entire year, nearly doubled in the US from 24% to 47% of podcast ad revenues between 2018 and 2019.

US Podcast Ad Revenue Share, by buy type, 2018 and 2019

Meanwhile, quarterly ad buys and scatter ad buys, where ads are purchased closer to the time they air, declined — making up 31% and 21%, respectively. According to the IAB, podcast ad revenues totaled $479.1 million in 2018 and $708.1 million in 2019.

This is a sign that more advertisers are including podcast ads in their long-term marketing plans, rather than just using podcasts to experiment with. It's a testament to the rise of the podcasting industry: Listeners are increasing rapidly — eMarketer expects US podcast listeners to grow by nearly 15% to surpass 100 million this year — and podcasting platforms have responded by working to meet the technological needs that advertisers have come to expect from digital formats.

The growing podcast audience in Canada has brands taking notice. It's a fixture in consumer media consumption and a sticky medium. Listeners consume podcasts heavily compared with other forms of informational media, and they are loyal to the hosts of their favorite shows.

In podcast penetration and usage, Canada ranks at the top of selected countries surveyed by Edison Research and Triton Digital in the latest annual installment of The Infinite Dial, which has been tracking podcast listeners in Canada since 2018. For podcast penetration, 37% of adults in Canada were monthly podcast listeners, the same as in the US.

Backtracks functions as a kind of fifth layer in the podcast listening ecosystem, enhancing the RSS feeds basic download-counting abilities with supplemental data from partners and podcast streaming app APIs.

None of that data is rigidly standardized, though. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has attempted to standardize podcast analytics terminology, but, so far, every podcast hosting service and audio analytics software provider counts engagement slightly differently.

Imagine the perfect custom talk radio station tailored exactly to your unique likes, with a never-ending flow of great content.

That is exactly what Apple could soon be delivering with its recent podcasting acquisition, Scout FM. Because that’s precisely what Apple has achieved already — in the music sense — with its new personalized music stations in iOS 14.

The concept behind podcasting is simple: combine the best qualities of what we love about a radio show with the immense capabilities offered by the digital revolution.

And with this simplicity, comes great diversity. Podcasts come in all shapes and sizes, across languages and borders, dealing with an enormous variety of topics and speaking to the hearts of an ever-growing global audience.

It is no wonder that they have become one of the most beloved and popular media in the 21st century. But how did it all start – and where are we now?

A simple idea: a brief history of how podcasts came to be The advent of the internet and new digital tech has naturally played the biggest part in establishing the podcast industry.

While the concept of audio blogging and on-demand listening to audio and video files has been around since the 1980s, primarily in the context of education and research, podcasting as we know it didn’t really exist until the 2000s. Its existence was in big part thanks to the iPod device launched by Apple in late 2001, which inspired a whole new way of listening to music and audio files.

MTV VJ Adam Curry and developer Dave Winner are widely considered to be the pioneers of the podcast revolution, when they teamed up to develop a software dubbed iPodder in 2004 – and the rest is history.

iHeartMedia announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Voxnest, the leading consolidated marketplace for podcasts and the best-in-class provider of podcast analytics, enterprise publishing tools, programmatic integration and targeted ad serving. With this acquisition, iHeartMedia, through Voxnest, will now be able to provide podcast advertisers with additional targetable inventory at scale by allowing the effective and efficient monetization across an entire range of podcast inventory on this one-of-kind programmatic platform.

What is missing in the audio space today are platforms that empower podcast makers to build membership communities — and make it easier for podcasters to sell their own subscriptions. Today’s biggest platforms are not designed to help podcasters build and strengthen their audiences and their communities.

What’s missing is the ability of a publisher to create rich interactive experiences and distribute that on any app or any smart speaker.

In the coming year, I have no doubt that the biggest podcasting stars will continue to see large paydays as tech platforms bid to buy them out. But unless podcasting platforms evolve, what we could be left with will resemble the big industrial radio oligopoly of the late 1990s, and the diversity and promise of podcasting could begin to disappear.

Podcasting is marketing. And companies have been using branded podcasts for a long time. But while many companies, big and small, have attempted using branded podcasts, not all of them have been equally successful.

Begin with a strategy
No matter what the nature of your business is, creating a branded podcast starts with a sound strategy. What are the objectives of your branded podcast? Who is it for, and what is the purpose behind creating it? These are the first questions we ask any brand before starting an engagement. Well-executed branded podcasts are not about just the podcast, but about everything from strategy to research to storytelling to distribution.

The role of podcasts in the information ecosystem has gone largely unexamined. While alt-right figures have been increasingly chased off Facebook and Twitter, podcasting is shaping up as the next arena where the fight over questionable or dangerous content will play out. However, the problem of how to moderate audio content is proving thorny.

As podcasting grows in stature and revenue, its disinformation problem can’t be ignored.

Illustrating how podcasting have captured the interest of people all over the globe in recent years, research company Grand View Research suggested that the global podcasting market size valued at USD 9.28 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.5% from 2020 to 2027. During the pandemic, listeners worldwide are observed to be spending more time at home due to work-from-home and social distancing policies – changing the entire dynamics of the market for podcasts, which used to have a pre-pandemic target audience of people listening to broadcasts during their commute. The industry is now expected to grow with engaged listeners who are stuck indoors while working from home.

TV meant to be responsive to the moment seemed distant. But podcasts, with the intimate production values, felt more immediate and relevant than ever before.

In a year otherwise defined by loss, one area of our lives has remained untouched; abundant, even. Movie theaters closed and blockbusters were delayed. Music and theater venues shuttered. But TV marched on. The number of original scripted shows dipped slightly, but international series and older shows arriving on the streaming platforms more than filled the void of shows canceled or delayed.

And yet, as the pandemic months piled up, TVs seeming imperviousness to the halt of all other cultural activities started seeming less like a virtue and more like a vice, like denial, like a dispatch from a faker world.

Cuban shared his unique insights about the current and future state of  not just podcasting, but the entire media industry. We discussed both legacy media companies and independent creators.

Here are the main takeaways and my thoughts from our conversation:

1. Streaming is the future, and legacy companies need to get on  board in order to survive
2. These days, audio is just as competitive as video because the  barrier to entry is lower and there's no pressure to look nice
3. As new technology emerges, media will continue to evolve — and creators must keep up

For several years, employers have tried to develop "relevant" and creative ways to successfully train new employees. After all, employees are more likely to pay attention to training videos and seminars if they can actually relate to the content. While there have been some pretty outrageous attempts over the years—just take a look at the 1989 Wendy's training (music) video designed to instruct new hires how to properly pour coffee—some of the methods do work.

It’s not every employee’s favorite task but it’s time for your online training course and you would rather sift through your emails than make the time to log on. But you know you have to get it done. Don’t let other work distractions get in the way of your course; here are 5 tricks to stay focused:

Schedule it: Depending on how long your online course is, schedule it into your calendar and set a reminder. Making time for it, instead of just finding the time, will help you actually complete the work. Adjust your day accordingly to fit around your training course.

Time it: Choose to take the course during your lightest time of the day and when you are most ready to work. Typically the first two hours after lunch or when you first arrive at work are good times. 

Close your door: Don’t be afraid to close your door and post a ‘do not disturb’ sign. Keeping your door closed will deter people from walking into your office and distracting you.

Log off: Log off your email and any other websites that are distracting, including your company's internal instant message application. Log off and stay off until your course is complete.

Turn off notifications: Turn your phone ringer off on both your cell phone and work phone until you complete your course. You can even turn off your email notifications to help you remain on task.

Times are tight. Though you may have found an online training program that will teach you the skills you need to get to the next level in your career or at your company, your boss may not want to pay for the training. With so many companies cutting their budgets and freezing spending, not many managers are open to what they see as "unnecessary" spending for employee training.

ClickBank highest-rated income generating system. From the desk of the Operations Manager at ClickBank - I regularly refer affiliates that are searching for these tools directly to 1stPromotion Pro. The 1stPromotion Pro system offers a very comprehensive Clickbank search tool. Their storefront and search box plug-in offer 100% search capability of our Marketplace with great accuracy, and they continue to develop serious tools for serious Clickbank affiliates. Best Regards, Jennifer J., Operations Manager, ClickBank.

Andrew Goodman's 21 Ways to Maximize ROI on Google AdWords, first released in March 2002, is still the definitive how-to on optimizing your pay-per-click campaign.

In this program I will show you how to get listed on Google in days. Costa Dedes provides a never before seen technique. Learn how to get on google. Get listed in days

What if you could synchronize the contacts in your Apple Powerbook’s Address Book to your cell phone? What if your car could use the same contacts in your phone to make calls with Bluetooth? That would be cool!

This release of MacWise fixes a VT100 / VT220 emulation problem. The screen could get scrambled by an incorrect ESC [ ascii code sent from the host. MacWise now absorbs the invalid code. Also fixes a rare Array Bounds Error message.

This release of MacWise adds a telnet option, "Use the tc shell to log in". When this option is enabled, MacWise first logs into the Mac unix tc shell before issuing telnet commands and opening the connection. This option provides more compatibility with host computers that request the terminal type. It could prevent error messages from the host such as "Connection refused by host" or "Invalid terminal type".

MacWise now has SCO ANSI emulation for Macintosh. All emulations now work with SCO ANSI. (Wyse, Viewpoint, VT100, VT220, Televideo). SCO ANSI colors, cursor positioning and a 25-line screen are supported.

Added option to keep TCP sessions alive for telnet and ssh. Look under the Special Menu for this option. It allows you to enter a time interval to tell the host that you are still there. This keeps the host from disconnecting you after a pre-determined idle time.

Fix - The MacWise Registration window would not open and you could not register the program.

Fix - If you closed the connection to the host, you could not open it again (when you selected Close Connection from the Connection Menu or Option - O from the keyboard). This problem was introduced in 10.7.63

Fix - Dragging the mouse to capture text on the screen would get an array bounds error if you dragged the mouse beyond the top of the MacWise window. More fixes...

Feature - Added "Black Transparent Set" to Window Colors. This is a black background with transparency to let you see behind the MacWise window.

Fix - VT100 and VT220 emulation - graphics mode was not returning back to text mode
Feature - Added MNP5 data compression to the list of available modem init strings.

MacWise can now use Kermit to log into your host using telnet or secure shell. If your host sends files to your Mac using the Kermit file transfer protocol, MacWise will automatically receive the file and place it in the kermit_Transfers folder in your Documents folder.

MacWise 10.9.20 Features and Leopard Compatibility

Telnet, SSH and Unix shell dialog windows now support copy and paste. You can now paste IP addresses into the host address field. The dialog windows are also movable.

This is the first version of MacWise to use Nib Menus and dialog boxes, making it easier to localize the interface for foreign languages.