It took me a while to hop on the podcast bandwagon. In the early 2010’s I kept asking myself, who has time to sit around and listen to people talk? Sure, car rides were the most optimal time to turn on a podcast, but between listening to music and a fairly short commute, I never got into a rhythm, unless on a road trip.
The pie of “potential minutes to listen to podcasts” grew in 2018 when AirPods entered my life. After AirPods, going to the grocery store, exercising, yardwork, and cleaning up around the house opened up all this new found time. I could go about my regular life and listen to something without a chord dangling from my ears. I listen to many more podcasts because of AirPods and based on the numbers below, I’m not the only person who had their pie of “potential minutes to listen to podcasts” grow. Over 200 million AirPods have been sold since they launched in 2017.
When personal experiences with AirPods have such a profound change on how I consume content, mapped with industry trends pointing to a large market adoption, it is another great example to double down on compounding content. Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur, investor, and respected thinker shared an insightful quote: “Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.”
The data around podcast listening, podcasters, and the characteristics of individual podcasting is fascinating and worth a read.
As we just launched our second podcast, I’ve come to be an even believer in the benefits of them as they provide a simple mechanism to scale conversations and make a larger impact.