Podcast Movement Confab Attracts 2,500 Attendees

This week's  Podcast Movement Conference was a sold-out 2,500-attendee event in Philadelphia that called itself “the world’s largest gathering of podcasters.” Attendees came from as far as Australia, China, and Brazil. Opening Tuesday, it had the feeling of an evangelical revival and a self-help group, with an emphasis on how to broaden the audience for a 15-year-old digital platform popular with 48 million weekly users.

According to philly.com, techie-sounding podcasts are still misunderstood by many other Americans who don’t know what they are (“on-demand radio, like Netflix for audio,” said convention organizer Dan Franks) or how to find them (mostly through smartphone apps).

But U.S. podcast advertising boomed last year, up 87 percent to $317 million, according to Advertising Age. Advertising and sponsorship remain the top ways to finance podcasts — with some getting listener support — and everyone from radio station groups to Google to start-ups is betting on growth.

Popular with millennials because they can be listened to “anytime, anywhere,” podcasts have become a mantra for media companies seeking to tap into app-generation millennials. Podcasts are cheap to produce and offer repurposed radio content without the shock-jocking as well as  thoughtful conversations on complex topics and original content. True crime and comedy are popular genres.

Podcasts also have been helped in recent years by the ubiquity of WiFi for downloads, unlimited-data wireless plans, and storage-rich smartphones. Most podcasts are free.

“Video got ahead of audio,” Tim Murphy, senior vice president of business development at Entercom Communciations, the Bala Cynwyd-based company that now owns CBS Radio, said at the conference. “But I think the trajectory will be the same.”

Tom Webster, senior vice president at the Edison Research firm in New Jersey and a lead podcasting analyst, said in one of the keynote speeches that about 48 million Americans listen to podcasts but that now the goal should be 100 million, calling it “podcast’s next frontier.” The challenge to those producing podcasting is to make more high-quality content to drive audience gains, he said.

Google executive Zack Reneau-Wedeen told a packed audience as an opening speaker that the internet search-engine giant is preloading Google Podcast on Android phones, opening podcasts to two billion global Android phone users. One can search for podcasts on Google Podcast over the smartphone screen.

There were about 500 attendees at the first Podcast Movement Conference in 2014 in Texas. Other events were in Chicago and Anaheim, Calif. Franks, a convention organizer, said that planners had expected 2,000 attendees in Philadelphia. But the conference blew through that target, with 2,500. Some meetings were standing-room-only.