How are podcast advertisers gonna deal with YouTube?

Vol. 48 - Tell me your Canadian Podcast of the Year? Plus TPX's Jeff Ulster and Pary Bell talk Canadian podcast trends.

Jun 26, 2024

Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday, and *warm* welcome to SUMMER TIME!

In this issue:

Pod the North’s “Canadian Podcasts of the Year”
TPX’s Jeff Ulster and Pary Bell talk trends in Canadian podcasts and advertising.
Canadian Indie: The BS-Free Service Business Show
True North Podcast Feature: LANDBACK For The People

There are currently 30 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 28 First Nations communities across Canada.

What are Canada’s “Podcasts of the Year”?

Believe it or not, now is the time of year when podcast critics and reviewers are seriously thinking about their “Best of the Year” lists. Earlier this month Nick Quah released his list of the “Best Podcasts of 2024 (So Far)” and so did Esquire’s Brendan Menapace; both lists including a Canadian/American-made project, Broomgate: A Curling Scandal from CBC Podcasts and USG Audio.

Despite the exciting success of Broomgrate,these lists are typically written by our industry neighbours to the south and that mean it’s usually rare to see more than one Canadian podcast on a “Best of the Year” list — especially one that’s indepedently made.

So I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate something like this — a little noteriety — into the Pod the North community. So I’d like to introduce, Pod the North’s Canadian Podcasts of the Year.

But not yet.

There’s no way I’m putting together a list of Canadian podcasts myself — personally, I don’t actually love reviewing that much. Instead, this list is going to be made up of myself and 9 other contributers from the Canadian podcast scene… and maybe a Juno-award winner for fun.

Who are the contributers? Well, from now until August 1st you can enter to be randomly selected to be one!

I’m looking for:

CANADIAN PODCAST INFLUENCERS (ie, Critics, Culture Writers, Industry thought leaders, etc.)
CANADIAN PODCAST COMPANIES (ie, Studios, Agencies, RSS Hosts, Networks, etc.)
INDIE CANADIAN PODCASTERS

As a contributer, how you select your “Canadian Podcast of the Year” is up to you, but you'll need to be able to explain why. It could be your most-listened to show, something you were impressed by, a podcast that got you through a hard time, or something else all together.

The official list will come out this October in celebration of Pod the North’s 2nd anniversary, and it should be a pretty fun and diverse buffet of Canadian shows!

And for Canadian podcasters, imagine being able to say you’re Ron MacLean's podcast of the year? RIGHT?!?! (Still working on that…)

Want to shout out your favourite Canadian podcast of 2024?
Enter to be a contributer here.

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Thoughts from the ecosystem:

TPX’s Jeff Ulster and Pary Bell talk trends in Canadian podcasts and advertising.

Every year I look forward to the Canadian Podcast Listeners Report to release its findings on the state of the ecosystem.

The report is the product of two notable Jeffs: Jeff Ulster and Jeff Vidler, who met and commiserated over the potential of podcasts at CBC headquarters in Toronto, where at the time, Jeff Ulster was Director of Digital Talk Content and Jeff Vidler was presenting a study called “Radio on the Move” on behalf of his company, Signal Hill Insights.

“We were like, ‘we should find an opportunity to work together if we can’,” Jeff Ulster told me, who’s now Co-Founder and Vice President at The Podcast Exchange (TPX). “[Vidler] really knew that podcasting was going to be something, but he didn't have any experience. I was really well versed in podcasting and I had an affinity for research, but certainly was not a researcher. So we thought, wouldn't that be a nice combination. Then weirdly coincidentally, the Globe and Mail came around in 2017 and said, ‘we've got a little incubator project. We have three people who are working on understanding the podcast space in Canada’. We pitched each other and to make a long story short, we said, why don't we do a national survey?”

It was 2018 that TPX was formed thanks to that research.

This year, and numerous reports later, the The Podcast Exchange welcomed their new CEO, Pary Bell, who described himself to me as a “disruptor in media” and successful “failed artist”.

“Once we were able to actually acquire that data, we realized that the audiences here in Canada were very engaged and growing,” Jeff told me. Canadian audiences also skewed more affluent, more educated, more diverse and younger than your average Canadian consumer.

“The other thing that we were observing at the time was that Canadians were in fact hearing podcast ads, but those ads were mostly just coming from the US. The research was telling us that Canadians were actually listening and attempting to respond to those ads only to find that they hit a dead end because the ads of the product or service wasn't even available in Canada. We thought we could improve that listening experience and make it more relevant for Canadian podcast listeners.”

I talked to Jeff and Pary to get their insights on the current opportunities in podcast advertising, especially with the shift to YouTube, and how Canadian podcasters should be thinking about success.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Paid subscribers can listen to the whole conversation on Pod the North tomorrow!

Kattie Laur: I recently posted that article about where the money is for Canadian podcasting, and you reached out to me saying ‘hey, we've got insights on this too’. So how would you compare the Canadian market to the American market these days?

Pary Bell: From a macro perspective, the scale of budgets and the opportunity to play for brands in Canada is much more limited. We are a conservative country, we like to take limited risks.
When you are working with limited budgets and limited scope, it's really hard to have that reach and have the success that you want to have. You have to be a lot more targeted. You have to be a lot more careful. And so by nature, we tend to be fast followers. We watch the innovation that takes place, we learn from it, we customize it, but a lot of the innovation, a lot of the risk taking, it's a little easier for the Americans to do it with their budgets.
The key word I would say in the market is curiosity. There is a lot of curiosity about what this medium can do. What kind of ROI could we get out of it? And what we are finding is that once marketers start to play in the space, they start to see that listeners have this parasocial relationship between host and listener.

Jeff Ulster: On the content creation side, Canadians seem to be at the forefront. It's just unfortunately that a number of Canadian podcasters started working in the US because it's where the dollars are.
For the first time this year, we actually got some Canadian data in terms of what's being spent here in Canada: you basically have to divide in 10 and subtract 4 years to look at the level of spend in Canada relative to the U.S.

KL: I'm curious to hear your insights about podcasts and advertising, and now the shift to YouTube.

Ad space used to be so much more available on TV, but now people have gone to streaming platforms where ad space is much more limited. Podcasting almost seems like the place to buy ad space at this point, but with the shift over to YouTube – where there are ads placed in the middle of a sentence – any interesting stats that you can share around ads on YouTube podcasts versus audio-only mediums?

PB: Some of the amazing things about podcasting is it's incredibly intimate. It is something that's auditory. It is something that's portable. All of that is not true about YouTube. I'm not saying it's not engaging. It is absolutely engaging, and it's fascinating to see how it can drive awareness of a podcast.
Ad-load is going to be a big question at some of the conferences – how many ads are too many ads. When does skipping ads become an industry problem? In other platforms, ad blockers are a massive issue for many, many digital publishers out there and they're there for a reason: it's because the user experience has tipped too far into an unworkable situation.

JU: I think the podcast industry on the whole and podcast publishers have been pretty careful and protective of what the ad experience is like in the context of their audio content. There's exceptions where you'll hear terrible radio ads get stuffed into a podcast and that's a pretty negative experience for the listener and the data bears that out, but on the whole I would say very, very good protection of the listener experience and an interest in maintaining that.
YouTube is a completely different thing. The reality is people don't like that YouTube is part of the podcast ecosystem. It doesn't really matter whether you like it or not, consumers are using that platform just like they used YouTube for music before it had its own music breakout, right? People are just drawn to YouTube.
Why are they drawn to YouTube? It's convenient. Overwhelmingly, the reason why people are consuming podcasts on YouTube is because of the convenience factor. They're already using YouTube for many other things.
But unlike the podcast space where the technology has been developed to align with the experience that publishers are trying to create, we're now jamming a square peg into a round hole. YouTube wants all the money to themselves. So what you get is this disparate experience around how advertising works. For some podcasters who are lucky enough, it can still be an effective medium.
If you look at people that tend to listen more on YouTube compared to people that tend to listen more on Apple or on Spotify, you'll find pretty significant differences in those audiences. They are lower income, they do tend to be less educated, they're less attractive to certain kinds of advertisers in some ways.
It's starting to get a little more amorphous and gray in the sense that because people are choosing YouTube as a platform because it's convenient, that doesn't mean they only will ever use YouTube. Some people are being introduced to a podcast from YouTube and then going on to consume it on an audio platform. We're watching this play out, but for the advertiser experience, it's quite different on YouTube and definitely not the same appeal for advertisers and also not the same type of receptivity to ads in that space right now.

KL: What can you tell me about the Canadian advertisers that you're working with? When they come to you, do they already have a notion of advertising on YouTube versus audio-only?

PB: I think everyone's looking at YouTube a little bit on a, ‘let's wait and see’.

JU: When I started doing this we would have a room full of people and say, ‘how many of you are listening to podcasts?’ There's virtually none. When you looked at particularly younger, skewing people, like teenagers, they really go, ‘what is a podcast?’ Those same people are the most adverse podcast consumers now, and when you go into an agency and ask who's listening, it at the very least lines up with the Canadian average and often they are understanding the content side of it in a way that they didn't.
I think there's still a big misunderstanding about what you can get from podcasting in terms of metrics relative to other digital media, or just relative to media in general. [Podcasting is] in kind of a funky place because it's digital, so you get certain kinds of digital insights that you can't get from conventional radio or television.
But it's not a banner ad, so you can't measure it quite in the same way. It's based on a feed, so the biggest misnomer is around downloads. People are being given information that actually applies to other media and not podcasting, and then they expect it from podcasting because they've been told that's what podcasting delivers.

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KL: Jeff, you and I chatted over email about charts. Outside of the Triton Ranker there isn't really a great idea of who the top podcasts in Canada are. What is your sense of how important charting is for a Canadian podcast in the first place?

JU: I think it doesn't help podcasting that in other media you're able to look at the top box office sales.
The problem we have in podcasting is that some of these different companies will say ‘we'll chart you, but you pay us and then we put you on this chart’. And then they're owned by a company that's in competition with another podcast network that doesn't want to be on that chart or doesn't want to give them money to be on that chart. There's a lot of that stuff going on and what you wind up with is – from an agency perspective – a lack of clarity around what is doing the best.
We tend to lean on the direction of the Canadian Podcast Listener Survey, because it's the only place where anyone's saying to listeners, what do you listen to?
The fact is that there are actually hard numbers. You don't need to ask people if you had the data that backed it up and being pulled into one system and then being charted out.
I think it's a challenge because people will look at Apple and Spotify and think those are the charts. People who know a little more about it know that that's not actually the function of Apple's top whatever chart – that the function is to try to encourage as much listening and interaction as possible. So podcasts get surfaced near the top of that chart for reasons other than popularity, and there's a lot of ingredients that go into that. It's a complicated conversation.
Just to provide some broader context, there are literally millions of podcast titles – and I'm not talking about episodes, I'm talking about series, whether they're short or long. From the limited data that we get at Canadian Podcast Listener – we ask 1600 people to name up to 10 podcasts [they’ve] heard in the last month. We get close to 3000 [titles] [and] typically this is the way it breaks down:
You have Joe Rogan, which is a monolith. Then it starts to get a little more interesting; you don't have to get more than about 30 podcasts into that list before less than 1 percent of the group that we're surveying is a listener to that podcast. Approximately the last 70 percent of these 2700 titles are named by literally one person in the survey. If we interviewed 200,000 people, that list would get more and more interesting. But the broader observation is a long tail – it's very fragmented.
If you're an indie Canadian podcaster, you're not going to compete with a Joe Rogan. But you are delivering an audience that's really valuable to advertisers. You're making content that could be very meaningful. And you could be affecting Canadian listeners lives in a really profound way. So the people that aren't at the top of the chart are really important. Part of what we want to be able to do is aggregate enough of those indie players together that we can make it possible for them to monetize and have a shot at making a living making podcasts.

KL: Thinking about the Canadian Podcast Listener Report that’s due to come out this year, what trends are you expecting to see?

JU: I think the reach is going to continue to grow. I think we're going to start seeing more older listeners in the mix because they're growing. I turned 55 this year. I just flipped into the 55 plus group, so that's one more podcast listener right there! Part of it also is that more content is being made actually for those audiences, and we are starting to see that in the US that that demo group grows.
I think video is absolutely not going away. I think AI is entering the picture as it is in most media. When you look at monthly podcast listening it's about 38 percent for Anglophones in Canada and 28 percent for Francophones, so there's still a lot of room to make its way up. That's another area in which I think you're going to see some growth.

PB: I joined the Canadian Podcast Listener Council to talk through the next survey. It was really nice to see this cross section of Canadian publishers and stakeholders – competitors coming together all vested in the entire industry.
There is a really nice unity in the Canadian podcast industry both from a content creation and a monetization front. I've actually never been in a council meeting where there was so much common ground and that was also really encouraging.

What Pary and Jeff are loving:

Check out this Canadian Indie: The BS-Free Service Business Show

Fluff-free lessons to help you grow your own business and get paid.

Behind-the-scenes of running a business as a freelancer, creative or agency.

True North Podcast Feature: LANDBACK For The People

Lifting up the revolutionary strides within the liberation movement for Indigenous Peoples and our homelands.

Raised by the movement, President and CEO of NDN Collective, Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota) delves into past and present LANDBACK struggles across Turtle Island and the Indigenous world.

Don’t miss the flagship podcast from Pod the North, Canardian: the podcast that’s gossiping about the hometowns of various Canadian podcast personalities.

Listen to Canardian

What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:

New Releases:

June 10, 2024 — Oats for Breakfast has returned with their first new episode since May 2021. The team sits down with Montreal-based journalist Anaïs Elboujdaini to talk about her experience of being in Israel on October 7 and the reporting she has been doing on Gaza since then.

June 17, 2024 — The Cited Podcast has returned with a new season: the Rationality Wars. It tells stories about the political and intellectual battles to define (ir)rationality.

You should know…

Congratulation to max collins, who recently joined Canadaland as their new Production Manager!

Best Podcast Finalists at the 2024 Prairies Region Awards have been announced! Best of lucks to Decision Manitoba: The Podcast, The Shell Lake Massacre and The Loop: How do we talk about inclusive education?

Hey Black Canadian Podcasters, don’t forget to apply to the Black Podcasting Awards! Submissions close on July 31st.

Nominations for the Women in Podcasting Awards are also open! Submit your show for nomination before August 1, 2024.

For your pod:

If you have thoughts or Canadian podcasting news, please share them with me! Leave a comment or reply to the newsletter email.

If you’re feeling generous, there are a couple ways to financially support Pod the North at any budget: opt-in to pay for this Substack on a monthly or yearly basis, buy me a coffee, or buy an ad!

You can also listen to Canardian and rate it five stars!

Thanks for supporting Pod the North, I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!

Kattie
@Podkatt (Twitter, Spotify, and Goodpods) | @PodtheNorth (Bluesky and Instagram)

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