Thinking Big with Smaller Podcasts: How Niche Can be Nicely Profitable

We hear a lot about about just how many podcasts are “out there.” At last count, we’re up to more than 800,000 podcasts. This fragmentation causes headaches for content creators and advertisers alike. Getting your podcast discovered by listeners is more difficult when you have so many competitors. For advertisers, reaching your target  audience feels a lot more complicated than buying 3 or 4 radio stations in a market to hit your target.

Luckily, this wealth of content brings opportunities as well; with so many podcasts available, there’s a podcast for everyone, no matter what your passion is, and a podcast for every interest means there’s a way to reach those passionate listeners.

Niche podcasts offer an opportunity for advertisers to hit extremely targeted audiences. If you’re Pen Chalet, what better place to advertise than the Pen Addict podcast? If you’re selling hand-dyed yarn like Infinite Twist, you’ll waste a lot of ad dollars buying ads on The New York Times’ The Daily, but Yarniacs provides an environment where every impression hits the bulls-eye. A niche podcast not only delivers the audience that’s the right fit for your product, but is hitting them at the right time—when they’re immersed in content that connects to your product or service.

If you’re producing niche podcasts, your small but passionate audience could be valuable to an advertiser producing a related line of niche products. The bonus is that by running ads relevant to your listeners’ interests, your ad will make for a better listening experience.

You don’t have to cater to extremely niche hobby communities to gain an advantage targeting smaller podcasts. Take investing podcasts for example: in The Canadian Podcast Listener 2019, only 3.3% of monthly podcast listeners named an Investing podcast as one they listened to in the past month. Comparing this to Comedy (37%), News & Politics (24%) and Sports (16%), the Investing genre would be a difficult way for mass-market brands like Coke or McDonalds to capture their market, but for an advertiser looking to find a high value investor when they’re thinking about their investments, that 3.3% could be a gold mine.

Diving into this example, there were a total of 34 investing podcasts listened to by the 1,538 monthly podcast listeners in our June 2019 survey.  Looking at the top 10 podcasts, we can see the profile these shows are attracting:

Almost entirely under the age of 55, with $75k+ household incomes and post-secondary education, this audience may not be the largest, but it’s a potential gold mine for financial services companies. Firms like Questrade looking to reach millennial investors could certainly reach them by advertising on Comedy and True Crime podcasts, or network TV for that matter. But by fishing in this smaller pond, there’s a much better chance that their impressions are luring high value prospects when they’re in the investing mindset.

There will always be a place for mass market advertising, but sometimes the best course of action is to think small. And that could be the greatest opportunity offered by the long tail of podcasts.

The Canadian Podcast Listener Study 2019—including the Canadian Podcast Chart—is co-published by Signal Hill Insights and Ulster Media, with support from The Podcast Exchange (TPX). Results are based on online surveys using a market representative sample of more than 4,500 Canadian adults from Maru Voice Canada. A free summary report of top-line findings from this year’s study is available here.