Those who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis now listen to seven podcasts per week on average, a number up from the average of five podcasts weekly, according to the 2018 Infinite Dial report. Even better, podcast listeners listen to all or most of 80% of podcasts once they start them — that’s huge engagement and a meaningful metric for anyone who relies on an engaged audience, from advertisers to publishers. Even the biggest challenge standing in the path of continued podcast growth, poor discoverability, likely won’t be a problem for long: Google’s new podcast app is integrated with Google search. Audiobooks — the publishing industry’s single fastest growing format, with more than $2.1 billion in 2016 — certainly make sense as podcast tie-ins: Podcast listeners and audiobook listeners have an obvious overlap in their preference for audio narratives, which means one audience can feed the other and vice versa. This fact was demonstrated when Amazon’s Audible, the world’s largest producer of downloadable audiobooks, branched out into podcasts in 2016.
Print books can benefit from podcasts, too. Macmillan runs one of the oldest and most well-known publishing podcast networks, the Quick and Dirty Tips network, created in 2007. The network grew out of Mignon Fogarty’s hit Grammar Girl podcast, which became a fast success at its launch and led to Fogarty’s appearance on Oprah and her authorship of a New York Times best-selling book. In 2018, the QDT network comprises 10 weekly podcasts which see two million monthly downloads, and also gets three million unique visitors to its websites a month. Books published by hosts at the network are often branded with the QDT logo, journalist Simon Owens has pointed out, a move that harnesses the network’s influence and converts it into print success.
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