A statistical analysis of two leading podcasts

 

I was inspired a few weeks ago by a story that Five Thirty-Eight did analyzing the fields that guests on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert came from, in its first 100 episodes, and how they compared to the other late night talk shows.

In short, Five Thirty-Eight found that Colbert had a significantly higher percentage of guests from the worlds of technology, science, politics, literature and culture – outside of the usually dominant categories of guests – actors and musicians, or movie, TV and music stars.

So I wondered what the numbers would show about the nature of guest bookings in a long-running podcast, and whether the numbers would show that a given podcast, or podcasts in general, have more varied kinds of guests than TV talk shows, news programs or other larger media.

Choosing Chris Hardwick’s “Nerdist” and Marc Maron’s “WTF” for this comparison naturally does mean the results will be skewed toward entertainers of some kind, but these seem like the forums closest to a late-night TV talk show for evaluating in the same way.

You can see the findings in the attached chart. The percentage figures given are the percentages of that kind of guest out of the total number of guests to date on those podcasts – for “Nerdist,” this is through episode 797 and for “WTF,” through episode 695. The sample sizes therefore are different, but a few obvious conclusions spring up once all the data has been collected in this way.

Maron has a far greater emphasis on comedians as guests than Hardwick, while Hardwick has a far greater emphasis on actors than Maron. This is a little tricky, because there is some overlap between actors and comedians. For this comparison, I lumped guests that could be called both into one field or another, depending on quick judgment calls about which was their primary emphasis, or which pursuit they were better known for. On “Nerdist,” this meant 23 shows included as comedians could possibly be classified elsewhere, and 41 shows featuring actors. The percentages of his overall total for these are 2.8% for comedians and 5.1% for actors. For Maron, it’s 36 actors (5.2% of his total) and 38 comedians (5.5% of his total).

So I don’t think these significantly change the picture you’re seeing in the graph, but let’s say you did arbitrarily switch them. You could only potentially increase Hardwick’s percentage of comedians by 2.3% and reduce Maron’s percentage of comedians by 0.3% -- and therefore vice versa for actors.

Anyway, onto other interesting conclusions about the guest rosters. Hardwick more frequently had no guests – with episodes he calls “Hostfuls” where he banters with co-hosts Matt Mira and Jonah Ray. Maron’s miscellaneous episodes, as placed on the graph under “no guests”, are actually mostly live panel episodes, with panels consisting mostly of comedians – if you moved these to the “comedians” category, it would increase his percentage of comedians even more.

Maron shows a deeper interest in music, but the percentage of his guests who are musicians isn’t that much more than Hardwick’s. And the percentages of guests for both shows who are anywhere outside their strongholds of entertainers, such as authors, writers, fellow broadcasters and podcasters, and even film directors – if you consider them a little more specific or specialized than actors and comedians, is relatively small – possibly even smaller than some of Colbert’s percentages of such guests on a network TV talk show.

Both podcasts had a negligible percentage of guests from areas not shown on the chart. Hardwick has only had 7 guests from the world of comic books – and I think that’s counting two different Stan Lee appearances. Visual artists, film and TV producers, entrepreneurs, business people and chefs number under 5 appearances on both shows.

So, what’s the point of all this? What the numbers really bear out here is that podcasting (or at least these two popular, well-known and successful podcasts) may not be so much more rarified in the professions of their guests than TV talk shows are. One could even make a case that “The Nerdist” is not really so nerdy since it has such a small percentage of guests from the comic book industry, video gaming, science or technology. Although to truly back that up, one might have to tally how many of Hardwick’s guests were from The Walking Dead, Star Trek or other nerd favorites, and analyze how much of the content from his “Hostful” shows covered that ground.

Mapping the Podcast Content World (Part 2)

To return to the mapping of the podcast world I began here two weeks ago, this week I’ll cover the broad range of shows aside from comedic ones covered in the previous entry. This may not seem like it pertains to the business and marketing aspects of podcasting to which I’ve dedicated this blog, but the content that is being sold in this medium is also important to consider, and does affect how the medium is used.

Comedy does drive a large and varied range of podcasts, and that’s a big chunk of what I listen to, but there is an equally large range of podcasts being done that are simply informative or educational, or that fit in genres including pop culture, storytelling, sports, politics, technology and business.

The shows I will mention here are simply the ones I’m most familiar with and can be called good examples to illustrate what the genre is. This is by no means an exclusive list. If I look at it three months from now, I might have a lot of changes. I’ll break it down by categories.

Educational – This is the broadest category, and can cover a lot. 99% Invisible, which has shorter episodes than most, clocking in at 15 or 20 minutes each, covers topics that are related to design in some way, even if those topics don’t adhere to what is conventionally thought of as design, like the ins and outs of metering parking in a city, or how incidental sound is added to sports broadcasts for realism (bet you never realized that).

I’d also cite Thinking Sideways and the Bowery Boys New York City History shows as podcasts of this nature, which take a certain topic within a realm or philosophy, and explore it. Thinking Sideways is about mysteries in recent history, i.e. the past few decades, or at least the last century – topics such as the Max Headroom broadcast interruption, the Tylenol poisonings, conspiracy theories about the Denver International Airport, and more. It’s a podcast that raises questions among some about whether it’s actually any good (to cite podcasting favorite Bill Simmons sometime blunt question about specific movies, TV shows or athletes – ‘Are they any good?’), because its hosts sometimes vamp too long about the most basic parts of their stories.

The Bowery Boys similarly pick out a location or phenomenon from New York City history going back to any time from before the actual founding of the city to more recent decades. They tackle that topic or place in depth, quickly laying out some basics and then telling interesting stories about its development or history. This podcast is much better and more authoritatively researched than Thinking Sideways.

Pop Culture – “The Bill Simmons Podcast” spends most of its time on sports, so I could place that in a sports category, but there are way too many sports podcasts to enumerate in this blog entry, and the ones I hear (“The Jonah Keri Show,” to name one) are such a small percentage of what’s out there that it would not be authoritative to mention them. But once every week or so, Simmons veers off his usual routine on covering football or basketball with guests who can illustrate other angles about sports in general, or other topics entirely, such as Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, movie critic Wesley Morris and now colleagues from various other shows on his “Channel 33” grouping of podcasts. Among “Channel 33” shows, another stand-out pop culture one is “The Watch” with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, which is focused mostly on TV, but some movies as well.

True Crime -- I also have a longtime interest in true crime, and there are plenty of podcasts that cover this ground. Serial is very well known of course, and although I haven’t completed the second season yet, its host Sarah Koenig has an interesting and thorough manner of pondering every aspect of the cases the show covers, and taking listeners through how her views on the cases change as she investigates.

Two other lesser known podcasts are worth recommending – Criminal and True Murder. Criminal is focused on smaller offenses and how people think about them – such as counterfeiting – and also psychology around law enforcement and investigation, as heard in an episode about a family of coroners. True Murder, on the other hand, is much deeper and darker. I can attest to its quality, even having only listened to one episode, but the crime covered was extremely gruesome, so be forewarned, although the treatment of telling the story was sober and compelling. The stories covered in other episodes also are graphic, judging by the episode descriptions, so I have to give that caveat.

Miscellany -- This last category may not be so consistent as the previous ones I’ve mapped, but I’m noting them here as worth hearing – either for journalistic storytelling, interesting interviews, or simply an entertaining take on their subject. From NPR, Radiolab, and the venerable Fresh Air with Terry Gross, in podcast form, are worthwhile. Dan Pashman’s “Sporkful” podcast is an entertaining take on food and dining, without any snobbery. Re/Code offers a couple different podcasts whose topics are on the cutting edge of media, covering subjects such as the history of the Yelp reviews site and also interviewing accomplished media figures such as David Remnick and Andrew Jarecki.

Combining both this and the previous entry, it’s still not a comprehensive list. It’s just meant to give a picture of what’s out there, what content I think about and where I’m coming from when thinking through and relating ideas about podcasting as an industry.

Setting a standard for measuring podcast audiences

Note: Part 2 of "Mapping The Podcast World" will appear here later. This discussion of audience measurement felt pressing to publish first.

Nicholas Quah of the Hot Pod newsletter recently posed the question of whether there are not enough advertisers to support podcasts, or not enough podcasts that are attractive enough as advertising venues. One of the reasons for this problem, Quah says, citing several sources including the Wall Street Journal and technology business news site The Information, is the lack of an accepted standard measure of podcast audiences.

Quah adds that such a measure would stabilize podcasting as an industry and gain the medium more respect with advertisers, but stops short of a solution, saying this makes now a good time “to play around and figure out what works.”

That seems like a vague prescription, however, for podcasters who need a reliable standard to earn the trust of advertisers. A possible avenue could be something modeled on CPM (cost per thousand views), the longtime standard used for broadcast and print, which also mutated to mean cost per thousand impressions from online advertising on text or image pages (excluding audio or video streams).

Such a benchmark still leaves a lot of definition questions, though. What constitutes effectively serving an ad? A complete listen to a whole podcast (especially if that ad might be halfway through an episode)? A mere download of the podcast episode? Or the equivalent of actual “click-throughs,” which for podcasts, would mean someone using an offer code to try the advertiser’s service, or otherwise indicating when surveyed by the advertiser that they chose that product or service based on a particular podcast ad?

For its podcasts, a group of public radio broadcasters have issued an attempt at a standard, but this largely consists of technical specifications to prevent multiple counts of the same download (which can happen if requests are being counted, since sometimes multiple requests are needed to complete a download), or ways to make sure downloads are indeed correctly counted if they happen to be coming through the same IP address.

Either way, this presumes counting, correctly, the number of downloads, is the correct measurement. That may be so, and this effort is an attempt to ensure consistent standards within the public radio podcast world, to make its podcasts competitive with commercial podcast advertising networks like Midroll and Panoply. That doesn’t mean, however, that this standard is consistent with the way those commercial networks do their measurement to justify their pricing.

Still, download numbers may be the easiest measure, but to convince more advertisers of the maturity of podcasting as a medium, the industry not only has to get consistency on how to measure those numbers, but also arrive at accepted measures for engagement with the advertising, or response rates.

Mapping The Podcast Content World (Part 1)

I am writing these blogs because I listen to many different podcasts, and enjoy and appreciate the form. The mission of this blog right now is to unpack trends in both the practice and business of podcasting, and how it fits into all media discourse. With so many podcasts for even a casual listener to choose from, what one may normally like or follow closely may not always necessarily be what one’s in the mood to hear.

Instead of just listing favorite podcasts, let’s categorize some favorites by tone, style, structure and subject matter to create a helpful map that you can refer to, to think about and find what kind of shows fit certain moods. This week I’ll cover podcasts with roots in comedy – the ones that attracted me to podcast listening in the first place.

The easiest to group together are, indeed, comedians’ interview podcasts, where the host is or was a stand-up comedian or comedic actor, and their show largely consists of an interview with a comic, actor, musician or other personalities or accomplished guests. 

The hallmarks of this format include WTF with Marc Maron, The Nerdist (Chris Hardwick) and The Adam Carolla Show. To a lesser extent, Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast and Penn Jillette’s Sunday School are doing a looser, longer, less structured version of this kind of show. But among those first three, there are still distinct differences. Maron precedes his interviews with 10 to 15 minute personal riffs, which fellow comedian and podcaster Pete Holmes once joked should inspire someone to create an app to skip those and get right to the interviews.

Of these three, Maron’s interviews are probably the most incisive and likely to be revelatory about their subjects. Hardwick, on “The Nerdist,” does the barest of introductory banter, with a couple of colleagues (Jonah Ray and Matt Mira) who occasionally chime in on the interviews. Hardwick’s style of interviewing is much looser and more deferential to the subject, but also more likely to get the interviewee to share an extended story not previously heard elsewhere. Lastly, there’s Carolla, to whom the guest is often an accessory to whatever discussion he is driving – and this may be why he has frequent repeat guests (like Jo Koy, Dana Gould, Dr. Drew, Judd Apatow and Matt Atchity), rather than Maron’s usually one-time only chats, or infrequent repeat visits as Hardwick does (Hardwick’s favorites usually only return once a year or less frequently, when there really is new ground to cover with them).

 Beyond these mainstays, there’s at least three other subgenres of comedy podcasts – ones that have some aspect of radio sketch comedy to them, such as Comedy Bang Bang, The Dana Gould Hour and Paul F. Tompkins’ different efforts; solo comedian shows without guests, like Jim Florentine’s “Comedy Metal Midgets” and Bill Burr’s “Monday Morning Podcast”; and live interview podcasts, recorded with an audience, like Jeff Garlin’s “By The Way.”

I know there are probably many more podcasts I’m probably missing here or failing to categorize – Aisha Tyler, Allison Rosen, Todd Barry, Todd Glass and Pete Holmes are stand-ups who all have interview podcasts as well. My current tendency is to want to hear a lighter take, and for that I’d say Hardwick rates the best. Others that I’ve just mentioned, like Carolla and Florentine, and Maron in his introductory riffs, are better when you’re primed for something more caustic. The artistic sketch style podcasts are an even deeper dive, requiring more focus. You won’t get much if you’re just letting those wash over you.

Next week, a look at the wider world outside comedy-based podcasts.

How podcasting is saving independent, in-depth journalism and commentary

BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, the Daily Beast and other online news sites are influencing journalism by pushing it toward shorter and shorter stories and items – in a way that critics say is debasing journalism and public debate about important issues. Podcasts, however, are changing journalism in a manner that those critics are likely to applaud – by popularizing longer treatment of stories and discourses about topics and issues.

The ability of broadcast radio to support open-ended entertainment programs like Adam Carolla’s show has declined. But some might say public radio has bloomed and expanded, with ever more long-form journalistic shows, like several offered on WNYC in New York, and through its associated smartphone app. However, even public radio may not be suited to the full range of what is possible for radio or audio format journalism.

The most prominent example of successful long-form podcast journalism is “Serial,” National Public Radio’s spin-off podcast that devoted 10 hours last fall to the case of Adnan Syed, the Baltimore-area high school student imprisoned for murder in 2000 based on questionable evidence. “Serial” has devoted its second season, still underway, to the mysteries around the apparent 2009 desertion of U.S. Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured and held by the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years.

“Serial” was spawned by the NPR program “This American Life,” and has attracted an audience of millions. “99% Invisible,” a podcast about how design works in various facets of life and influences people, originated as a radio show in San Francisco, but reaches far more listeners as a podcast than in its airings on some public radio stations, currently ranking 22^nd on the Stitcher List of listener figures compiled by the on-demand Internet radio service.

The Stitcher list, a top 100 of podcasts, is a barometer for what genres of podcasts are popular. The list currently has a varied mix of news or politics shows, comedy and entertainment shows, and specialized technology, science and medicine programs. A majority of these shows are independently spawned; a healthy contingent originate from NPR or public radio; and only a smaller handful are generated by pre-existing media entities such as ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, USA Today and Time.

So, aside from being a vibrant home for the kind of content that seems to be challenged in attracting an audience in text-based online outlets, podcasting also appears to be the last bastion of independent, but still popular, points of view that are not owned or controlled by the biggest media companies. That same Stitcher List contains programs including the storytelling shows The Moth and Risk, and personalities such as Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Dan Savage – to name three whose points of view vary widely.

As this blog continues, I plan to explore multiple angles on the importance of podcasting, how the podcasting industry is developing, how to compare and contrast quality of specific shows, and whatever else comes to mind that falls under the umbrella of podcasting as a topic – and maybe even items that stray into the broader media landscape. I’m sure the point of view, the tone and the content will evolve, and I hope you’ll keep following.