Adding Teeth To Podcasting's Promise of Intimacy

Is intimacy overhyped in podcasting? Probably. Advertisers don’t buy podcasts because podcasts are intimate. They buy podcasts because podcasts perform and provide results. Making a more intimate experience hasn’t really impacted average ad CPMs which feel rather stagnant at between $20–$30 CPM for what… the last decade or so? And do we even measure intimacy in podcasting? Spoiler: we can’t. Consumption rates are neat, but only you assume few people play podcasts in the background while they study, work, or sleep. But we don’t have a good way to prove that. And I’m not sure we ever will. Our current standards body, the IAB, cares about measuring audience reach, not intimacy. And then there are the myriad bad actors who would almost certainly use intimacy measurement protocols in nefarious ways. What would you do if you could measure intimacy, either across your episodes or across your audience? Would you use those metrics to change how you produced your podcast? Or would you just compare your show’s intimacy metrics to the average intimacy metrics across all other podcasts, much the same way we benchmark our download numbers or CPM rates?  I’m genuinely curious, so email your thoughts to me or share your notions with the http://advancingpodcasting.xyz (Advancing Podcasting community). Because who knows? Maybe if the benefits of such information were surfaced, the infrastructure providers in podcasting would come up with clever ways to get us there? ----- Boostagram Corner!  Thanks to Brad Tirpak for becoming my latest Supporting Member and to Seth Goldstein for the virtual coffee. Links in the next section. ----- Links: • FREE 3-week trial of My Podcast Reviews -  https://mypodcastreviews.com/pp • Ad spending report via Magellan.ai - https://www.magellan.ai/blog-categories/top-15 • Historical average CPM rates via AdvertiseCast - https://www.advertisecast.com/podcast-advertising-rates • Questionable value of auto-downloads via Sounds Profitable- https://soundsprofitable.com/update/auto-downloads-default • IAB - Interactive Advertising Bureau - https://www.iab.com • Evo’s email - evo@simpler.media • Advancing Podcasting community - http://advancingpodcasting.xyz • More new podcast apps - https://podcastindex.org/apps • Support Evo on Buy Me A Coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/evoterra ----- A written-to-be-read article and a full transcript of the audio of this episode can be found at https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/adding-teeth-to-podcastings-promise-of-intimacy. Visit https://twitter.com/evoterra for more podcasting insights from Evo Terra as they come. Buy him a virtual coffee to show your support at https://BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra. And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit https://Simpler.Media to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show. Learn more about Allie at http://alliepress.net. Podcast Pontifications four times a week to provide ideas and ask questions every working podcaster should be thinking about. Subscribe today at https://PodcastPontifications.com. Photo by https://unsplash.com/@tomas_nz?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText (Tomas Sobek) on https://unsplash.com/s/photos/intimacy?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText (Unsplash) This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy Support this podcast