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cover of episode No Mercy / No Malice: The Podcast Election

No Mercy / No Malice: The Podcast Election

2024/11/9
logo of podcast The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Key Insights

Why did the 2021 election prove that podcasting is the mass medium of our time?

Podcasting played a pivotal role in reaching young voters, particularly men, who are more likely to be swayed by this medium. The intimacy and length of podcasts allow for deeper engagement and more relaxed interactions, making them a powerful tool for political campaigns.

How did Joe Rogan's podcast influence the 2021 election?

Joe Rogan's podcast reached millions, with his three-hour conversation with Trump being viewed 40 million times on YouTube in just three days. This level of reach and engagement is unmatched by traditional media, making Rogan's platform a key player in the election.

What makes podcasting a more effective medium for reaching young voters compared to cable TV?

Podcasting offers a more intimate and less confrontational environment than cable TV, where hosts are not looking for 'gotcha' moments. This makes it easier for candidates to present themselves in a favorable light and connect with listeners on a deeper level.

Why are advertisers increasingly turning to podcasting?

Podcasting offers a younger, more male-dominated audience that is difficult to reach through traditional media. The medium also provides a more intimate setting where listeners are more open to advertising messages, leading to higher ROI for advertisers.

How does the low cost of podcasting production benefit both creators and advertisers?

The low capital expenditure required for podcasting means that creators can produce high-quality content with minimal resources, leading to higher profits. For advertisers, this translates to more cost-effective ad placements with a highly engaged audience.

What challenges do new podcasters face in building a successful audience?

The podcasting market is highly competitive, with a few top podcasts capturing the majority of listeners and ad revenue. New podcasters need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership to achieve sustainable success, making it a challenging field to break into.

How does the attention economy impact the relevance of traditional media like cable TV?

As we transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to an attention economy, traditional media like cable TV is losing relevance to newer forms of media like podcasts. The ability to command attention is now more valuable than ever, and podcasts are better positioned to capture this attention.

Chapters

The chapter discusses the societal impact of being 'woke' and the significance of George Floyd's death in shaping public consciousness.
  • George Floyd's death became a pivotal moment in the struggle against state violence.
  • The perspectives of marginalized individuals often go unheard until a significant event brings them to the forefront.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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st in store and online this week on the grey area. Does being woke do any good?

George floyd became someone who mattered to us after he became a victim of state violence. And we could use his death in our powers struggles until that point. George floyd and his perspectives don't matter to us. People like George floy don't matter to us. We don't uplift their perspectives.

Listen to the grey area with me. Shinney new episode every monday, available everywhere. I'm sky alloway.

And this is no mercy, no mAlice. The election proved that podcasting is the mass medium of our time. The podcast election has read by George han.

I'm still in my pyjama, as haven't changed since tuesday night. I'm also drinking a fair amount and toggling between netflix shows nobody wants this, which is pleasant, but uber cli, I eat stupid and monsters, which, as the father of two boys, I find just plane disturbing in some for me, it's go IT again. Even my stocks are going up.

So twenty twenty one, i've received twenty two emails in the past twenty four hours. When i'm down, I obsess over inconsequential data as a coping mechanism, asking for my thoughts on the election. My reflection of desire or megalomanic, a belief that I can comfort strangers, leads me to remind them that nothing is ever as good or as bad as IT seems, and that the us.

Remains the us, the richest and freest country on earth. This election was neither what I wanted nor expected, but i'm still very much looking forward to moving back to america. I just read the previous paragraph and it's sort of true sort of my disbelief and despair are shape shifting to anger, a narrow ist president by crown and untested candidate, and asked her in one hundred seven days to overcome the crisis of immigration and inflation and the burden of an unpopular income ency when two thirds of the country says we're on the wrong track.

There is no way someone from the current administration can incredibly claim to be a change agent, much less the disrupt people are looking for in an age of age. I am going on A, C, three, sixty, M, S, N, B, C and smart nh. To discuss the male vote.

This election gave us the opposite of the expected reference among bodily autonomy. IT was the testosterone election. 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 periodical reshape our culture in politics. F, D, R, mastered radio.

J, F, K, leverage, T, V, and ragan nailed cable news. Obama energized Young voters via the internet. Trump hijack the world's attention on twitter. This year, IT was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harrison trumps respective appearances on call, her daddy and the joe rogan experience. Almost half of adult americans, one hundred thirty six million people, listen to at least one podcast a month.

The global audience is now five hundred five million a quarter of the internet reach when trump h went on joe rogan, lex friedman and this past weekend with theodore, he was embracing the manual here and writing a tectonics 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.

Rogan has sixteen million spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms. In just three days after the live podcast, his three hour long conversation with trump was viewed forty million times on youtube. The audio downloads likely exceeded fifteen million.

There will be a lot of second guessing regarding what the hair rs campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit rogan would have been a layup. By comparison, when trump appeared on fox news gut filled, which averages about three million viewers, he reached five million people.

And the full episode has been viewed two point three million times on youtube to reach as many people as he did via rogan trump. They've had to do at least three separate one hour hits on cable TV shows with numbers comparable to gut filled. There is really a handful of those, and there are all on fox, the top ated news channel.

Any other news network would have been a waste of his time. The typical viewership for CNN is below one million, and cnbc is less than one hundred k. Anyway, the comparison is apples to cocaine. Specifically, the audience on the pods is not only exponentially bigger, but also much more valuable, I E Younger, more male and more persuaded able.

What if a campaign could gather the tens of millions of undecided or persuadable voters who may or may not vote and put their candidate in front of them for three hours in an environment that sets the candidate up for success? The trump campaign achieved this by prioritising podcasts. Among foxes, three point five million regular viewers, seventy percent are fifty and over, and forty five percent are women.

The number two cable network, M S N B C, reaches one point five million viewers most days. Its medium viewer is a seventy year old woman, so a big audience of Young men. There is a small audience of older women.

People listen to pods to learn. They watch cable TV to santis y what they already believe. The former is much more appealing to candidates and advertisers. Rogan's demographic is eighty percent mail, ninety three percent under fifty four, and fifty six percent under thirty four.

Men under thirty four are the great White rino s of advertising the most valuable beast in the consumer jungle, and they're increasingly difficult to find the average listener of my profile podcast is thirty five mile and makes about one hundred fifty K A year. This is an audience I sometimes affectionately call stupid. They have disposable incomes and are in the meeting in many years, meaning their prone to buying all kinds of high margin stuff to try to increase their sexual attractiveness.

They are also the cohorts ambitious politicians want to reach both minnesota representative dean phillips, who launched a short lived primary chAllenge to biden, and massage sets representative sef multon, who loudly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, have come on the profile pod and been nice to me, and they're likely come back. It's not my charm. Both want to be president and recognize they have to build name recognition with Young man.

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 twenty twenty four is the fourth most traffic site in the us. Yet the company was valued at only five point seven billion dollars when IT debuted on the nas dex seven months ago.

Since then, the market cap of reddit is two hundred seventy four percent. The only ad supported medium growing as fast as meter. Tiktok, alphabet and now redit is podcasting.

Podcasting revenue grew eighteen percent this year, similar to alphabet at fifteen percent and meta at seventeen percent. Podcast share of attention is well ahead of their share of that revenue. This delta will converge.

I believe podcast revenue is going to grow faster than that of every other digital platform, with the possible exception of tiktok. My guess is that next year, pod's ad revenue will grow by twenty plus percent. Listenership will continue to grow as well, and the A R P U, like those of meta and alphabet, will increase dramatically.

Two, as advertisers discover this is where Young, successful consumers have been hiding, podcast cpm now are about eighteen dollars for a thirty second add and twenty five dollars for a sixty second add. When people approach me in the wild, it's easy to discern where they've been exposed to my content. A high five in some boy banter video if they greet me like a friend they haven't seen in a while podcast.

It's a very intimate medium. You are physically in somebody's year in a private setting, washing the dishes, working out, walking the dog. It's just you and them.

That's one reason advertisers like podcasts as the audiences I am being sold to screen is more porous. A listener's guard isn't up. Tom broca never had that kind of relationship with his audience.

That level of intimacy also makes podcasting a great medium for interviews. In his conversation with rogan, trump seemed unusually relaxed and comfortable, a guy you could grab a beer with. I always got more publicity than other people, and I didn't IT wasn't like I was trying.

In fact, I don't know exactly why. Maybe you can tell me definite. You said a lot of wild chit, maybe, and that's typical for a pod.

The medium has a zygi where hosts generally try to present their guests in a good light. Unlike cable T, V, the host aren't looking for a gotcha moment. We let the guest run.

Initially, people accused pods of being radio. They aren't. Pods aren't shackled to the clock for the listener or the podcast. They're on demand, I, E, streaming, and hosts decide how much time a topic deserves or doesn't. Think about this.

One of the key commercial advantages of movies over T, V, was the producers control over the cats and length of their content. They didn't have the twenty one or forty one minute guard rails that network T, V later imposed. Rogan thought trump story was worth three hours of his audiences time.

Not one or four T V anchors in radio hosts are asked to create differentiated art using a one size canvas. Broadcasters sink a lot of capital into state of the art studios, satellite trucks, transmitters, fibre optic cables. People at central 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 moats now been crossed.

When I go on CNN or another T, V network, I travelled to a studios, staff, ed, by numerous skill, technical people. The network pays their salaries and benefits and give them offices and snacks. A decent TV studio can easily run four hundred k it's also inefficient.

My show on CNN, plus weak flex, took a dozen or more people, the Better part of a week to pull together twenty one minutes of content, awesome content. But still, now my studio looks like a pretentious footballers dop kit. I doubt a cost a thousand dollars assembled by my tech guy.

Drew IT travels with me everywhere, any place that has broadband or just cell reception. I have a studio that can produce content. I'd speculate a third of my podcast are done from somewhere other than my home studio.

Think about how efficient that is. IT enables me to host or co host three pods a week and appear on many more. That kind of portability wasn't physically possible precoe.

Meanwhile, net neutrality ensures that any podcast I go on is available to anyone, anytime. There is no technical reason. I could not, in theory, reach every one of the five point two five billion humans on the planet with a digital device in broadcast, in cable T, V.

The platform has always been bigger than the talent in podcasting. It's the other way around. There is little sustainable enterprise value in a podcasting company.

What matters isn't copecks or infrastructure, it's talent. That's why a lot of individual podcasts ers are getting rich, but not a lot of podcast company is shareholders. All you really need to start is a computer and an internet connection.

You don't have to run the obstacle course of suits you encounter trying to get into TV or radio or any other old media, which is another reason advertisers love podcasts. There are fewer hands in the talents pocket, fewer hands in their pockets, resulting in a greater R O I. On ad spend.

Low cap CS means the profits can be enormous. Once a podcast covers the costs of producing two POS a week, like two or three producers and a part time sound engineer, the proof g podcast portfolio profile profile markets raging moderates will register twenty twenty five revenue of approximately ten million dollars. We employed five producers, two analysts and a technical director, sound engineer.

Few businesses garner one million dollars plus per employee pivot. The podcast I cohoes with carrer swish er does more revenue with even fewer resources. Note vox, our distribution partner, is responsible for and sales the pods that make the jump to light speed covering their fixed costs and you do are very profitable businesses.

The best part a as I have a great team with some people i've worked with for over a decade or more, I spent eight to twelve hours total per week on the pods. The leverage on my time is substantial. The cocktail of broad reach and low overhead translates to more for less for advertisers and talent.

All the moons have lined up in podcasting is on an upward spiral. But as with most everything, digital podcasting is a winner take most or all proposition because everyone has access to everyone. A scant handful of pods.

Those with the biggest listener ships capture nearly all the add revenue by some estimates of the six hundred thousand podcasts that produce content each week, the top ten get half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pace people well and keeps the attention of a host with high opportunity costs. You likely need to be in the top zero point one percent by listening.

The odds of success are admittedly dly long. If you're a high school drama student who goes on to join sag after a, you're two times more likely to win an academy award than have a sustainable pod. As a member of uc crew team, I was three point five times more likely to end up in the olympics than telling dick jokes and making a good living on a successful podcast.

I could do this all day. 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 weapons es in emerging medium he did.

By far. The most polite media weapon this time was podcasting. Life is so rich.