Watching the Podcast Bubble Burst From the Inside

I started my first podcast in 2009. It was nothing special, just a place to practice audio documentary and force myself to post something every two weeks. I was a preschool teacher in New York City and I was trying to find a way to break into public radio. What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that within less than a decade, I would find myself in a podcast industry bubble — one that many of us rightly suspected would eventually burst.

The podcast industry didn’t really announce itself until 2014, when podcasting In series hit. I was working on a small public radio history show that was syndicated nationally. A lot of our audience came from podcasts, like many other public radio offerings. But everything seemed different when In series abandoned. Virtually overnight, friends and relatives who had never mentioned a podcast I had worked on were asking me if I thought the show’s subject, Adnan Syed, was guilty. In series reaction podcasts have emerged, as well as ironic reaction podcasts to reaction podcasts. The show was popular enough that Saturday Night Live parodied it.

Over the next few years, everyone I knew in public radio could sense this change. Podcasts were no longer a side project. Investors have poured money into startups like Gimlet Media, which made a successful meta-podcast about how the company was founded. My colleagues at public radio were all about profit: getting hired, starting businesses, raising capital.

I jumped too. I quit my job and put my name around. Soon, Slate Magazine contacted me to produce what was supposed to be a one-off series on Watergate, ultimately titled Slow burn. The host was a mid-career print journalist named Léon Neyfakh who would become the most important creative collaborator of my career.

When we launched slow combustion, it was a surprise success even though having a podcast meant something. On Tuesday morning, my friends at NPR said their Slack channels were buzzing with reactions. Every time we released a new episode, I would check Twitter on my commute to work and scroll through a Greek chorus of hot takes. The Onion parodied it. It was a clue on Jeopardy. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years texted when they spotted my name in the credits. I was going to Los Angeles to attend the awards ceremonies. And when Slate sold the Slow burn From IP to TV, Leon decided we should start a company to take ownership of the work we create.

We founded Prologue Projects in 2018. At the time, there were several growth strategies in the industry. Some stores have courted venture capital, like Gimlet. Others, like Pineapple Street Media, have built work-for-hire portfolios. Many companies typically relied on a combination of ads running on their podcasts, selling the stories they reported as intellectual property to turn into television or films, and company-branded content. The article about the company was particularly interesting. A major beverage company, for example, would pay a considerable sum for a series on a brand-adjacent topic. The podcast company could then take a portion of those excess profits to help fund risk-taking creative projects. Leon wanted a different path: fewer shows, big budgets, production-heavy production, and most of the money coming from companies that paid for content like Luminary and Audible. He liked to say that we were more like an independent label than a corporate studio. It wasn’t a way to make millions, but it was a way to put on shows that we were proud of.

What I loved most about that time was how many weird ideas came up. Show as The habitat (about a group of people volunteering for an Earth mission simulating life on Mars), Winds of change (on the history of Cold War espionage and heavy metal) and The Ballad of Billy Balls (about the murder of punk musician Billy Balls) all took risks with niche concepts with no idea of ​​an ending. Launch of Pineapple Street Media The 11th to release a new experimental audio piece on the 11th of each month. Articles were circulating about this being the “golden age” of podcasting, and the results more than justified that label.

Even then, many of us were actively talking about how the industry was in a bubble. I overheard that business podcasts don’t have much of an audience. Advertising sales have exploded, as have budgets for big, risky shows that might not be successful. And we saw that a small number of shows chosen by Hollywood were ultimately made. So personally, I tried to treat it as such. My girlfriend and I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in a cheap neighborhood. I focused on paying off my student loans and saving for a house we bought when the New York City housing market tanked in 2020.

By 2023, we could see a decline in the industry. Advertising revenues declined, Hollywood slowed its intellectual property acquisitions, and investor investment slowed. Nearly every major podcast site, from Spotify to NPR, has seen rounds of layoffs. The remaining jobs were increasingly focused on “evergreen” talk shows or low-impact formats that promised more stable advertising revenue than painstaking narrative documentaries. The podcast bubble had finally burst. Artificial intelligence has become the focus of new investments. “Having a podcast” has become the new “having a blog.”

Earlier this year, a friend of mine hosted a happy hour that he called a “wake-up call for podcasting.” It was the day before a big podcast conference in Brooklyn, right across the street from the hotel that was hosting the conference. Dozens of people from the industry were in attendance. Most people I spoke to shared their stories of layoffs and hardships. Those who had a job worried about how long it would last. I announced that Prologue Projects was laying off its entire staff and that I was leaving. It was hard to watch an industry of fledgling creatives drowning their sorrows and wondering what the next step would be. While none of this came as a surprise to those of us who had been talking about the bubble bursting for years, when the time came it was still a shock.

And yet, podcasting is not dead. Based on my conversations with people in the industry, there’s still money in specific content areas like true crime, wellness, finance, and comedy — especially if you have a big name attached and a low-production format. Major podcast companies began seeing double-digit growth again last year on these types of shows. But ambitious journalistic series and bizarre concepts aren’t as well-funded or as ubiquitous as they were just five years ago. There are fewer jobs and what was once full-time work is largely temporary work.

Of course, now that I have more free time, I have a list of small, experimental podcast ideas that would have no market outside of a cult favorite. At a lunch a few months ago, a friend told me that this was a time when you couldn’t expect funding for these kinds of ideas. You just need to create them in your free time.

It occurred to me that, in a way, this was a return to the beginning. When I was publishing a podcast from my living room, shows like 99 percent invisible, the Palace of Memory, And Love + Radio all started as passion projects. This spirit is what started the industry, and it’s also perhaps what underpins the most revolutionary audio of the next decade.