![]() ![]() But I do find it compelling to contemplate a future in which Slate primarily operates as a podcast publisher with a significant written web engine that functions as an effective lead-generation tool. Unsurprisingly, the company expects growth in all key revenue areas - including display advertising and membership dollars in addition to podcast advertising - which, if true, would stabilize the growth of Slate’s podcast advertising dependency. Whether that number continues to grow over the next few years will be something to watch. By the end of 2017, that number has shot up to 25 percent. (“We like to share when they’re happy numbers,” Turner said, when I expressed marvel over the volume of information being provided.)īut perhaps the most telling data point is this: In 2014, podcasting made up 0 percent of Slate’s revenue portfolio. ![]() Slate’s podcast advertising revenues were up 36 percent in 2017 over 2016, and the company expects continued growth this year, or so it is said.December proved to be Slate’s biggest podcasting month, driven in good part by Slow Burn (more on that show in a bit), with 3.5 million downloads across the period.Podcast downloads are said to be up 42 percent from 2016.Slate enjoyed 100 million downloads in 2017 across its entire podcast network, not counting shows under the Slate Extra banner.Turner dished out some numbers to set the scene: We’ll stick to the audio portion here, of course, and our primary interest is to get a sense of just how strong that podcast business model is for Slate. “There are good economic models behind both.” “We’re planning to expand editorial spending on podcasts and articles,” she said. She also notes that those renewed commitments are, in part, a reaction to the “pivot to video” gambit employed elsewhere in the digital media ecosystem, increasingly lampooned these days either as folly or a cynical ploy to extract dollars from the unstable hype surrounding digital video. “We look at the redesign as a recommitment to the written word and audio,” Julia Turner, Slate’s editor-in-chief, tells me. Accompanying the aesthetic revamp are significant adjustments to the site’s editorial architecture - including, among other things, a reorganization of its content verticals and, of course, a long-overdue push to make its substantial audio output more prominent across its web presence. Slate readers woke up this morning to something big from the 22-year-old online magazine: a total redesign, complete with an overhauled backend to improve the site’s user experience and a new logo to mark its third decade of publication. This is a tad newsier and more with-the-pack than I generally like to be, but whatever - there’s a bunch of juicy, usable stuff in here. We’re heavy on the “new year, new you” beat this week, folks. This is issue 147, published January 16, 2018. Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday. ![]()
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