2021 is the year of podcasts. 2020 was also the year of podcasts. Even 2019 had been, “undoubtedly”. And at the moment everything points to the fact that 2022 will also be “the year of podcasts”: someone already says it. In fact, in recent years and even more in recent months, the number of new podcasts has grown – including several from the Post – as well as the successful ones: and there is an increasing frequency of initiatives, acquisitions and agreements by large companies. companies, each interested in taking a slice of this growing and promising sector.
There is no doubt that podcasts have also grown in Italy, sometimes even finding effective business models. However, it is still very difficult to have exact, clean and precise numbers on how many Italian podcasts are, how much they are listened to and, above all, how many their listeners are overall. It is not just a problem of podcasts: it is equally difficult to say for sure, and with shared metrics, how many people have seen a TV program or a series in streaming, or listened to a certain song or read a certain book. But at least for podcasts, some numbers can be found.
Listeners
When it comes to podcasts listened to in Italy, the data most often cited come from studies conducted by two major market research companies: Ipsos and Nielsen . According to data collected by Nielsen last April, 14.5 million people in Italy had listened to at least one podcast in the previous year. A figure in slight growth compared to 2020 and in significant growth compared to those of 2019 and 2018. But the study was commissioned by Audible, the division of Amazon that deals with audio content, and was quite broad in defining what it could be a podcast.
In general, therefore, the data provided by Ipsos are considered more useful, whose studies exclude both audiobooks and the so-called catch-up radio (broadcast radio, with episodes or parts of them listened to or downloaded as if they were podcasts), and in trying to figure out how many people have actually listened to a real podcast in the last month. The Ipsos data, collected in July and processed on the basis of online interviews made with a little more than two thousand people between the ages of 16 and 60, estimated that in the previous month “about 9.3 million people” had listened to at least one podcast. Also in the case of Ipsos, the data showed “a slight growth but which consolidated the positive trend recorded last year”.
The data from Ipsos and Nielsen seem to be quite in line anyway: the millions of listeners of difference could be people who have only tried listening to podcasts and others who listen to audio content that Nielsen considers podcasts and Ipsos instead do not. And they are comparable to other similar data collected by Statista, also in that case based on interviews with a few thousand people, in this case aged between 18 and 64 years.
Podcasts, to begin with
Another way to try to understand how big and how much the podcast sector in Italy has grown is to look at how many there are in Italian . From this point of view, the more in-depth analysis was made by Alessandro Piccioni, podcaster and founder of the Tonidigrigio communication agency. Piccioni used the data available on Listen Notes, which he defined as «the most important search engine in the Podcast field in terms of quantity and quality of information». They are not absolute figures, but given the many ways and places in which and on which a podcast can be made and published, they are the best available.
According to data collected by Piccioni, in August there were more than 25 thousand podcasts in Italian, over 10 thousand of which were published during 2020. “Basically,” wrote Piccioni, “the podcasts produced from 2004 to 2019 represent 36 percent of the current offer of Italian podcasts ». Among many other things, in his in-depth analysis Piccioni then divided the podcasts by topics (the main categories are “culture and society”, “art” and “music”) and noted that less than one Italian podcast out of three is made up of more than three episodes, and only 29 percent of podcasts have at least 20.
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The analysis also highlighted how, among the podcasts present, many were not updated in 2021: because they were soon abandoned by their authors or because they were simply concluded. Piccioni then identified what can be defined as the “oldest podcast in Italy” among those still indexed (Jacopo Fo did it, and the first episodes date back to 2004) and the longest-lived (one of the Radicals of Friuli Venezia Giulia, born in September 2004 and still active). 2004 is among other things the year in which the first articles mentioned that new thing that was “podcasting”, and that in doing so they used a neologism that described a technology, not a type of content.
Piccioni is now working – together with Assipod, the Italian Podcast Association – on an investigation (still in progress) which “aims to map and identify some aspects of the world of authors, producers and creators of podcasts in Italy”. And he is also the author of “Metropolitan Legends”: a podcast whose third season is about to arrive and which is “dedicated to myths and legends of modern folklore”. He explains that he started with “very moderate ratings, linked above all to the circle of friends”, but that now he travels “between three thousand and four thousand plays per month”. Are so many? They are few?
Note: the ratings
It is much more difficult to obtain exact data on how much podcasts are actually listened to in Italy. Because podcasts are hosted and listened to on many different platforms, which have no particular interest in communicating their absolute numbers in detail. And because – a bit like it happens in many other contexts – it is difficult to agree on what a listening represents, that is, on how many seconds or minutes must pass before a certain episode can be considered “heard”.
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Although each for its own piece, these data are however available to the companies and companies concerned, as well as to the authors and managers of the individual podcasts. Those who deal with podcasts for the Post, for example, can consult – through the services of the Spreaker company – the data on the audience of individual podcasts and their episodes on the platforms (which are added to those, now largely predominant, generated by the app of the Post, here for iOS and here for Android). And discover, among other things, that there is still someone who in the last few days has listened to Wembley, the podcast of the Post on the European football championships won by Italy.
To have a few orders of magnitude: the experience of Morning, the daily podcast of the deputy editor of the Post Francesco Costa – for weeks at the top of the Italian charts of Spotify and Apple while doing most of its ratings, almost a hundred thousand every day when it was open to all, on the Post app – suggests that to finish at the top of Spotify's podcast ranking requires at least several thousand daily plays on the platform, and at least one hundred thousand a month.
But the rankings of the most listened to podcasts on the platforms are useful up to a certain point because, as the journalist Andrea De Cesco explained in her newsletter “Questioni d'orecchio” (full of analysis on the podcast market and reviews on new releases) , the parameters that companies like Apple or Spotify use to draw up those rankings are not known. As for the song charts, it is not only the absolute numbers that determine them, but also how fast they grow – their “virality” – and other more or less variable factors. Spotify's ranking, for example, is determined by an unspecified combination of a podcast's overall follower count and the number of its unique “recent” listeners.
Then there is an obvious – and legitimate – conflict of interest: some of the podcasts that Spotify includes among the most popular of the moment are produced by Spotify itself. Who, in general and regardless of which podcasts he produces, may be interested in calculating and presenting his ranking by evaluating certain parameters more than others, so as to make it more attractive and perhaps lively, in order to make his customers discover new podcasts.
Chiara Sagramola, who deals with advertising in podcasts for Spreaker, says that as far as Italy is concerned, the company considers podcasts of “medium / top” level those that make “between 20 thousand and 50 thousand plays per week”, and that among these there is “a 10 percent of podcasts that reach over 100 thousand plays a week”. These are numbers that take into consideration the ratings made both through Spreaker, from the site or on the app, but above all done elsewhere: “79 percent of the plays on Spreaker”, he says, “are done on the other listening apps”. Sagramola also adds that the authors of podcasts “Spreaker offers the possibility to decide whether or not to make the number of plays public” but that “almost nobody does it now”.
Some other numbers are offered by Francesco Tassi, CEO of the Voisland “podcast network” and of the “podcast media company” Vois. Voisland's podcasts, says Tassi, in the first 15 days of October received about 855,000 listeners overall, coming from about 454,000 unique listeners.
Marco Cappelli, who works in marketing and is the author of the podcast “Storia d'Italia” says instead that his podcast – which has long been stable among the top 100 in the rankings of the most listened to podcasts made by Spotify and Apple Podcast – is “about 70 thousand plays per month “. 40 percent of them on Spotify (“but I'm one of those for whom Spotify weighs less,” he says) and 85 percent via smartphone.
Another interesting fact is that about 70 percent of the ratings are generated by episodes released more than a month earlier. It is a sign of the fact that the podcast is growing, because there are those who are now recovering the history of the episodes and it is a consequence of the fact that, speaking precisely of history, the episodes do not expire, as happens for many. podcasts related to current events and events of a given day. Another figure of which Cappelli is understandably proud is that of retention, which – in summary – indicates how much an episode is finished, not just started: for “Storia d'Italia” it is close to 80 percent.
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“In my case, the catalog is worth a lot,” says Cappelli, who is the author of one of the main independent Italian podcasts, ie produced independently, without the support of specific companies. To tell the story of Italy in his podcast – which has existed since 2019 and has already exceeded one million total plays – Cappelli started from the battle of Ponte Milvio, fought in 312 after Christ, and now that he is approaching the hundredth episode he is occupying the sixth century. His ambitious goal is to reach the present day, and he says he plans to take “about a thousand episodes to reach the unification of Italy”.
Growth
The data available to Sagramola, Tassi and Cappelli also confirm that we have been arriving for a couple of years, and above all for a few months, in which Italian podcasts have grown, among other things – it seems: it is always difficult to establish – with an intensity comparable to that of a few other countries in the world.
Also this time the coronavirus has to do with it, but up to a certain point. “The pandemic was not positive,” says Cappelli, because “it broke habits.” It can therefore be said that the pandemic and all that it entailed have “benefited the production of podcasts, rather than listening to them”. Agrees Tassi, who among other things points out that “in the first months of the first lockdown the production of podcasts increased by 20 percent, with a peak on religious ones”. A significant increase in audience seems to have taken place later, compared to the first months of the pandemic, and therefore especially during 2021. “In August 2021,” said Sagramola, the Italian podcasts present on Spreaker were “47 percent in more than the previous year “.
Spotify recently said its podcast catalog in Italian in the last year it has grown by 89 per cent (a percentage slightly higher than that of the rest of the world, in which about one and a half million podcasts were added between September 2020 and September 2021).
To give an idea of the “general growth trend” of recent months (which among other things means that any description of the podcast market older than a few months is in danger of being outdated), he gives examples of two of the podcasts of which he deals with. One is Things very human, of which Tassi says: “it is always in the Top 10 of Italian Spotify podcasts”: “it got there when it made 200 thousand plays a month” and now “it makes almost 500 thousand”.
Another is Storie di Brand, which in a few months went from “about eight thousand plays a month” to almost seventy thousand today. All this, adds Tassi, without the podcast positions in the rankings having changed too much, a sign of the fact that the number of plays needed to earn a certain position in the rankings has grown over time.
With reference to the data on Italian podcast listeners presented by Ipsos and Nielsen, presented and commented on in “Questioni d'orecchio”, De Cesco says that they are “likely” and that speaking of about ten million Italians who have listened to at least one podcast in the 'last month “is not an impossible estimate”.
From here on, while we're at it
It is difficult to expect that more exhaustive data on podcast listeners in Italy will arrive in the next few years, also because, as De Cesco explains, “there is a lack of research institutes that do only this”. Furthermore, if the number of total listeners can be useful to give an extent of the phenomenon, it is a data of little use for those who make podcasts and, above all, for those involved in making them economically sustainable.
Obviously, other factors are far more important. First of all, those related to the possibility of monetizing certain podcasts of particular absolute success (or of particular relevance for a specific target or a well-defined niche). In this sense, the availability and effectiveness of advertisements, or the willingness of a certain number of listeners to pay for a particular podcast, matter much more. From this point of view, Sagramola says that for a company like Spreaker “it is not necessary to have a large number of ratings, but to have it constant”, on which, for example, it is much easier to “make budget projections and forecasts”.
Also according to Sagramola – among other things, author, not on behalf of Spreaker, of the “Catchy” advice newsletter – as regards the advertising sales of podcasts «in Italy we are still in an initial phase, very early». According to her, despite the tens of thousands of podcasts that apparently already exist, “there is still a lot of space for podcasters”, as well as for those who want to advertise.
All this while all the major tech companies in the world (including Facebook) are moving to take their share of this market. While Italian translations of foreign podcasts are starting to arrive, while podcasts combined with TV series or podcasts followed by the publication of a book are becoming more and more frequent, while more and more companies offer exclusive podcasts (only on Spotify, those in Italian are already 14), and while we are already talking about the prospects of “interactive podcasts”.
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