Podcast audience starts to plateau; Carsales to share AI transformation story at HumAIn
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade: Today: A first look at the February data on podcasting performance in Australia which suggests the audience may no longer be growing; we reveal more speakers for our HumAIn conference on AI in media and marketing; and Nine leads a rally on the Unmade Index.
Unmade’s paying members support our analytical journalism. In return you get access to our full archive which goes behind the paywall after two months and your own copy of Media Unmade. You also get discounts on tickets to our events, including our forthcoming AI conference humAIn, our retail media conference, REmade and a free ticket to our annual Compass series.
Carsales to share how AI is driving conversions
Cat McGinn, curator of HumAIn, writes:
Carsales Mediahouse will take to the stage at Unmade’s HumAIn conference to share how the platform is using AI to target audiences and increase conversion rates.
The panel featuring Carsales and and tech partner AdFixus will offer a deep dive into the data, customer privacy and technical considerations needed to prepare for the transformation, and the steps to success.
HumAIn, which focuses on the practical, immediate applications of AI in a media and marketing context, takes place in Sydney on May 28.
The panel will share how they scoped the AI led project and outline a deep dive into the data, customer privacy and technical considerations needed to prepare for the transformation, and the steps to success.
The panel fatures Carsales’ Senior Data Scientist Markus Dollmann, Vanya Mariani, Commercial Director of Media – Sales and Customer Solutions, and CEO of data and privacy technology firm AdFixus, Marko Markovic.
The trio will share their perspective on tackling the AI adoption the business has recently begun, from how the organisation has approached training data, the AI principles and safeguards they developed along the way, and the impact on their commercial success – as well as the learnings and unexpected challenges.
Speakers for HumAIn already revealed include a keynote from Jeremy Somers, creator of the world’s first AI creative agency, Not Content, on the process of using AI to create work for global brands, and AI entrepreneur Stephen Hunt on how teams of all sizes can start using AI tools.
We can also today reveal the topic for this year’s Great DebAIt: “AI is the news media’s extinction-level event.” Anyone interested in arguing for either the affirmative or negative should contact Cat McGinn via cat@unmade.media.
Those interested in sponsorship opportunities around the event should contact Doug Wesney via doug@wethinkmedia.com.au.
HumAIn takes place in Sydney on May 28. Earlybird tickets, with a saving of 20%, are on sale for the next three weeks only.
Podcast reach starts to level off
Tim Burrowes writes:
For a brave new world, the podcasting ecosystem sure does follow a lot of the old habits of radio.
That includes dialling back efforts in December and January. Radio teams mostly went off air when the last ratings survey of the year ended on December 2, and didn’t return until it restarted in mid-January.
With much of the podcast content machine still being fed by radio content, it means that today’s new Australian Podcast Ranker numbers, which cover February, are the first proper snapshot of how the 2024 battleground is unfolding. It also makes month-on-month comparisons to January fairly meaningless.
Looking at the new results, month-on-month listening is, predictably, up on January. But compared to February 2023, there’s far less movement. Dependign on the metric, things have maybe even gone backwards.
We’ll come on to the top individual podcasts shortly.
When it comes to monetising podcasts, the place to look is the ranking of the sales houses. It has become a two-horse race with only Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr and ARN Media’s iHeart offering significant reach.
The ranking of sales houses includes repping podcasts made outside their own networks. Listnr moved to first place last month, selling ads to 6,995,377 listeners. That’s up by 7% on the same time last year.
ARN’s sales reach to 6,818,824 listeners is up by only 0.1% on a year ago.
The third placed sales house, Nova Entertainment is down 1.4% – from selling ads to 2,117,938 listeners last February to 2,088,226 this time.
News Corp, in fourth place, is also down slightly, from 1.4m to 1.3m. So is Mamamia, down from 1.3m to 1.2m.
A number which suggests that some sort of plateau has been reached comes from adding the listeners across the top 5 sales reps. In February 2023, they offered a (duplicated) reach of 18.1m. This time round the number was 18.4m.
In terms of total monthly downloads (as opposed to the smaller number of monthly listeners; think of that as a reach number) the top five publishers delivered 74.5m monthly downloads in February 2023. This year, that number was 58.7m – a fall of 21%.
In large part that is likely to be because of a change to the Apple Podcasts automatic downloads system late last year. New episodes are now less likely to end up on phones unless the listener requests it. The chances are that the 74.5m downloads in February 2023, included a lot of unlistened-to episodes.
A number that would be useful to see from the Podcast Ranker’s operator Triton Digital, but which is not currently published, would be the overall total number of monthly listeners and monthly downloads across its ecosystem. Although not quite all podcasts are captured in the system (if I understand correctly, Spotify and Audible are not participants for their own content) it would be a good snapshot of the scale of the market.
A further way of ranking is of the podcast publishers featuring only their own content. That’s where the non-commercial ABC comes in.
ARN and its streaming platform iHeart remains top with 4.5m listeners. That’s up on 4.7m last February.
Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr is second on 3.2m, up from 2.6m a year ago
Third is the ABC on 2.5m.
On to the top podcasts…
Casefile True Crime, the low-fi retelling notorious crimes, is back at number one for the month, with 878,248 listeners. But that’s down 8% on the same time a year ago, despite the leap year making this February one day longer.
The second place podcast Shameless pulled in 639,860 listeners last month, up 13% on a year ago.
In third place, Mamamia Outloud stood still, with 579,409 listeners, compared to 577,279 a year ago.
And in fourth place, comes the highest ranking radio-derived podcast – The Kyle & Jackie O Show. That’s significantly down on a year before when it was in top slot. Having been the only podcast to break through 1m monthly listeners, with 1,060,541 listeners in February 2023, The Kyle & Jackie O Show pulled in a relatively relatively disappointing 515,223 this time round – that’s a fall of 51%.
The fifth placed podcast – Conversations, from the ABC – doesn’t have a year-on-year comparison because the ABC only joined the ranker at the end of last year. It is however, the highest an ABC podcast has yet been placed in the ranker.
It will take a few more months to be sure, but this month’s data suggests that the big audience growth phase of podcasting is over.
Nine leads Unmade Index off the bottom
The Unmade Index bounced back a little on Tuesday after hitting Monday’s all time low. The index recovered by 1.23% to 569.6 points.
At the top end of town, Nine saw the biggest improvement, up by 2.18%. Fellow broadcast stock Southern Cross Austereo improved by 2.07%. SCA’s would-be acquirer ARN Media went the other way, dipping by 2.96%.
Seven West Media didn’t move, stranded on a market capitalisation just over $300m.
This morning, Southern Cross Austereo confirmed it had received a formal notice from shareholder Spheria to attempt to spill the board in a bid to speed up the proposed merger with ARN Media.
Time to leave you to your Wednesday.
We’ll be back tomorrow with an audio-led edition, featuring the founding editor of The Saturday Paper, Erik Jensen, with the story of how he set out to do the opposite of everything he’d seen in other newsrooms.
Don’t forget to drop Cat McGinn a line if you’d like to argue one of the sides of The Great DebAIt at cat@unmade.media. At the very least, it gets you a free ticket to the event.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
