Content Soup: everything is starting to look and sound the same

ALSO: UK political podcasts will never be a campaigning tool

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Back in the 1940s, comic strip yokels looked to the sky. “It’s a bird!” they said, of the blurry figure zooming above them. “It’s a plane!” they corrected themselves, as its speed increased. “No,” someone finally added, realising that a plane and a man are significantly different sizes, “it’s Superman!”. A bird, a plane, a Superman; three in one, one in three.

Comedic misunderstanding aside, the reality is that when you’re not expecting a man in lycra to be whizzing through the troposphere, you’ll reach for more obvious explanations. Like birds, or planes. Eventually, presumably, the residents of Metropolis became inured to the sight of the showboating Kryptonian, leathering it across their skies. Eventually, presumably, they looked to the skies and either said, “oh, Superman…again…” or said nothing at all. After all, who has time to point at every bird or every plane or every super hero?

For a while, podcasts were Superman. When people saw someone doing well, making a lot of money or reaching large audiences, they gawped at this spectacle. It led to constant conversations about how podcasts would be the next frontier of digital media, how podcasts were securing unprecedented investments, how podcasts were creating the next generation of media superstars. To include the word ‘podcast’ was to demonstrate that you were at the cutting edge. You were part of the in-crowd.

That was 10 (or more) years ago, and yet we seem to be back there. Everyone is talking about podcasts and podcasters. Did they propel Donald Trump back to the White House? Are they spreading large amounts of medical misinformation? Are they the past, the present or the future? In the past few weeks I’ve given quotes on the role of podcasts in the modern information age to the BBC, GQ, Sunday Times and Financial Times: everyone wants to identify and label the modern phenomenon of podcasting.

And labelling is key, because we are entering murky taxonomical waters. This is not just the man on the Clapham omnibus’s confusion about what a podcast is and how to get it, but a more mainstream, analytical conflation. Anna Nicolaou’s excellent primer in the Financial Times on podcasters and the President (‘The podcast bros who helped put Trump back in the White House’), for example, was accompanied by an illustration depicting five men (below) who are, from left to right: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz and Logan Paul.

I am not picking on the FT’s representation of ‘podcast bros’ not least because I think their analysis stands up (and I’m quoted in the piece) but because it illustrates something interesting. Joe Rogan, clearly the king of this movement, is often held up as the most powerful podcaster in the world. But his show, The Joe Rogan Experience, began life on Justin.tv (which later became Twitch, the premier streaming platform outside of YouTube) before starting on YouTube in 2013. On YouTube it grew like topsy, becoming far more powerful (and valuable) than it had been when it was a video stream accompanied by an audio only version distributed on satellite radio. It was the YouTube version of The Joe Rogan Experience that was worth the $200m that Spotify paid for it in 2020. There was only a short period, during this transition, when the JRE was exclusively available as audio – the full video show is now available via both Spotify and YouTube.

Theo Von is a stand-up comic who broke out on MTV. His ‘podcast’ routinely scores 1m+ views – as a video on YouTube. Logan Paul is a YouTuber with 23.6m subscribers, famous for ‘pranks’ like finding a dead body in Japan, not to mention fighting other YouTubers (and, for some reason, Floyd Mayweather) in insanely lucrative PPV bouts. The point I’m making here is that to call these men ‘podcasters’, without any further context, elides much of their oeuvre and the reasons for their success. It would be like calling Jason Bateman a podcaster, and never acknowledging that he has another career, or saying that Wolf Blitzer “hosts a really good podcast on CNN”. We are straying into category error here.

Does it matter though? It’s a YouTuber! It’s a streamer! No, it’s a podcaster! In one sense, I am comfortable with ‘podcaster’ evolving as a shorthand to describe the content, rather than the distribution mechanism. What we’re discussing here, really, is a talkshow – either interview or panel, in the old traditions of talk radio. The fact that the word is used interchangeably, to describe both the alpha video version or the beta audio rips, speaks to the extent to which they are conversational, loquacious, not a spectacle. The video version shows men (and they are usually men) talking; in the audio version you only hear them. Tomato, tomato ketchup.

On the other hand, though, it’s clear that ‘podcaster’ has come to describe something quite specific. A laddish, bro-ey form of, usually conservative, discourse. To refer back to an earlier example, people don’t tend to refer to Jason Bateman as a podcaster, partially because he’s got a whole other career, and partially because the work he does on SmartLess feels less conspicuously like that of a podcaster, in this new sense. Podcaster is starting to feel like a derogatory term.

But beyond this, quite semantic, discussion, something else is at play here. Part of the confusion over what’s a stream, what’s a YouTube video and what’s a podcast stems from the fact that all of these things are moving closer to one another. If this was a three part Venn diagram, it’d look like a lumpen circle, rather than three distinctive rings. There is a uniformity here. They involve people talking, usually in a continuous (or pseudo-continuous) format, rather than in a magazine style. They involve a lo-fi directness: microphones (and headphones) should be visible, the studio should be casually assembled and extend to little beyond a sofa and table. They involve a direct intimacy, eschewing cutaways and diagrams and inserts, preferring an almost evangelical direct-to-consumer approach. The hand of the producer (or editor) should be invisible at best, if not entirely (and genuinely) absent.

I woke up this morning – and like an addict taking that first suck on the crack pipe – read a piece about how Netflix is planning to start publishing video podcasts. The article cites ‘lower productions costs’, ‘built-in audiences’ and ‘advertising potential’ as the reasons why Netflix will go down this route (they reportedly already explored a nine-figure deal to publish Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, before losing out to SiriusXM). They are hardly the first streaming giant to take a look at this path: Hulu has recently bought the Hot Ones franchise that has become a major YouTube commodity, ESPN brought in Pat McAfee (another ex-Barstool sports YouTuber), and HBO Max, the most prestige-oriented of the modern streamers, has announced a version of SmartLess. Everyone wants in on this.

Here in the UK, it was announced last week that The Rest is History, the podcast that has precipitated a small, centrist revolution within our podcasting scene, would be adapted for television. Details on how exactly that will look have yet to emerge, but I suspect it will not be wildly different to how The Rest is History looks on YouTube. After all, why would you bother to shake things up? The very appeal of this sort of content is that it’s cheap (so why make it expensive?), intimate (so why make it formal?), and recognisable (so why invent it all over again?).

Already, news channels are embracing this familiar visual aesthetic. Remote guests – fairly standard even pre-covid but now utterly ubiquitous – have been joined by remote hosts. Where, in years gone by, production teams would have gone to great effort to make sure that the nuts and bolts of engineering were obscured from view, they are now being emphasised. Just take a look at this, below, screenshot from a show on the BBC News channel. Not only are the hosts’ notes on full display, we can also see the microphones, stands and cables, while the guest appears, beamed in, on a TV. The set, additionally, seems like someone has raided a Made.com catalogue: it is deliberately designed to look like a middle-class living room, complete with indoor fern.

Is this podcasting? Streaming? YouTubing?

No, it is content soup, a steaming broth made of components from all parts of digital media. Often it is called a podcast because a) ‘podcast’ is not a brand name (like ‘YouTube’), b) ‘podcast’ doesn’t have a long history (like ‘video’), c) ‘podcast’ doesn’t imply the content is necessarily live (unlike ‘streaming’), and d) ‘podcast’ is not quite as unadoptably nerdy as some of the other options (like ‘VoD’). But make no mistake: these ‘podcasts’ are not ‘podcasts’. They are soup.

The gravitational pull of the industry, at present, is towards more and more of this sort of content. It answers a lot of questions that have vexed current affairs programmers, such as how to reduce costs and how to establish a more communal relationship with your audience. And the fact is that the traditional podcast can sit, comfortably at the base of the new podcast pyramid. Everything is an audio podcast, most things are also a YouTube video, a select few are TV shows. It is a way of using and reusing content, of squeezing the orange not just for its juice but its pulp and skin too.

It’s hard to know whether content soup will save traditional media or kill it. There is a danger, certainly, in allowing outsider, insurgent trends to carry over into the mainstream. The bods at Netflix have witnessed the slow growth of their watch-time metric over the past few years, while there has been explosive growth for creators using YouTube. Wouldn’t it make sense to bring some of these people over to their platform, so that they might also bring that growth?

But the genius (an inadvertent one, in some ways) of YouTube’s model has been their ability to attract hundreds (literally) of $100m creators without so much as a contract on the table. YouTube might be a brand name, but it is also a medium in its own right. And if you want to be a successful YouTuber, you still have to ply your trade on YouTube. MrBeast or PewDiePie or Pokimane; none of them would be getting their break on Netflix. The same is not true of podcasts – you can be a successful podcaster without your show once appearing on the Apple Podcasts chart. The medium has become divorced from the platform, but on YouTube it hasn’t. And so Netflix, Spotify, even the BBC are chasing something that their biggest rival not only has a majority stake in, but also gets for free. YouTube continues to be an incubator, nurturing the next generation of $100m creators, even as it may lose the occasional creator to an off-platform rival. And even though a $100m Netflix deal won’t involve any money going directly to YouTube, they have an almost infinite supply of these creators. That’s the thing about cheap content: there’s a lot of it.

Over in TV land, budgets are being slashed, productions are being shelved, and a general feeling of gloom prevails. There will be executives at all sorts of channels who look at the soup and see it as a panacea. Content with existing audiences at a fraction of the normal prize? Tick, tick, tick. The important thing, for them, will be to thrash out a legally secure agreement, because drafting in IP, rather than developing it, comes with another set of challenges. And while it might feel like it solves huge scheduling problems (why wouldn’t you replace endless reruns of Eggheads with an hour of a hit podcast?) the problem with the soup is that it’s all-consuming. When everything starts to look and sound the same, people either switch off or they look for alternatives. It’s cyclical, and we will reach a saturation point.

Bird, plane or Superman mattered to the puny humans being crushed by General Zod; YouTuber, streamer or podcaster doesn’t matter to most punters. If the soup is nourishing, they will drink/eat it (depending on your preference of soup-consumption verb). But the landscape is becoming flat. Not only are these shows tonally and structurally similar, they are conforming to an ever more homogenous aesthetic. This has been reserved for YouTube for a while, but is starting to bleed into television, and soon there will be few ways of avoiding it. At that point it’s not as simple as saying ‘podcasts are becoming TV shows’ or ‘TV is becoming more like podcasts’. At that point, the entire basis of these distinctions becomes eroded.

And that wouldn’t matter, I guess, except that, as soup goes, these tend to be thin gruel. I want a pluralised world where, sure, there are some shows that are meandering powwows between men (who are either bald or sporting elaborate mullets), but there are also documentaries, magazine shows, and formats that operate over narrower timeframes. I want politicians to go on shows and get grilled for 10 good minutes, rather than fluffed for an hour and a half. I want to see Jeremy Vine bestriding his swingometer, not just Laura Kuenssberg in an IKEA showroom. I want a soup course and then I want steak and chips, sticky toffee pudding and a flat white. I want it all.

But more important than my desires (sadly) is the smell of success, and right now – call it whatever you like – this content soup is wafting its scent of sensation right towards the gaping nostrils of media decision-makers. And sure enough, once you’ve simmered the various digital media formats down, refined the material, what’s left – the rest – is soup.

Below the line, for paid subscribers, is a quick afterthought on the subject of British (and essentially any non-American) podcasting, and why it’s not a real political tool. Please do give a paid subscription a go; I feel a little bit better about the world each time someone does.