Sara Fischer

Chris said to me, the $5 billion number is the wrong number to be viewing the podcast industry because advertising-supported podcasts, the Pareto principle absolutely prevails.

But a lot of people from podcasts, they make money from other ways, whether it's selling subscriptions or selling merch or Patreons or what have you or live events, or podcasts are a marketing expense

for their broader communication goals and missions.

So he said the number that's a better proxy is probably like the $100 billion creator industry, not just assigning podcasts to $5 billion ads, which I thought was so fascinating because if you look at it that way, it is much bigger than radio.

And then two, you know, to your point of like, you know, very few podcasters make enough to actually sustain a living on this.

It goes back to what I was just saying about podcasting has become a really great tool

marketing tool, and especially, Scott, in the AI era.

In the era of LLMs, they're going to get so good at picking up insights from audio and from radio.

We're not quite there yet, but they're getting there.

And so if you are recording a podcast, maybe you're doing a blog post about it, that's a better way, potentially, to get your name and brand out there for your company, for yourself.

than it is, you know, to just simply do paid advertising.

You're completely correct.

And I've pulled that data before.

I think it was less than 1% get the vast majority of the, like 99% of the downloads.

I'm not quite sure on the monetization side.

One thing I follow very closely as it pertains to podcasting is just the broader shift in the knowledge economy into audio has been really important.

There's this company called Edison, which is considered one of the most authoritative research firms for audio.

And they put out this study that shows that the amount of,

of ear time is moved into being majority spoken word over music.

That is because more people are shifting their sort of information and knowledge diets into audio.