What's your potential audience?
Also: Quartz's sale (yet again) raises questions about paywalling
I started blogging on Medium back in 2015, when I published a piece (entirely uncelebrated) called “Show Me The Money: Why Don’t We Trust Developing Markets?” That was about football, and no-one read it. Then, in 2017, I started doing long visual histories of magazine covers and that was really where my love of the medium of Medium began. It wasn’t actually until August 2018 that I wrote about podcasting there for the first time.
Anyhow, I mention this because I’ve just hit 20,000 subs on Medium, which is very nearly 20,000 more than I have on Substack. This is not a criticism of you – you noble few, you band of brothers – but an observation about growth on that platform. I have tried, a few times, to reverse engineer whatever discovery mechanism is working in my favour, but I can’t do it. I just seem to get a couple of hundred new followers every day, regardless of whether I’ve written anything new.
Anyhow, as I’ve often observed to readers of this Substack, you are subsidising my cross-platform writing. So everyone I write on Medium – where I don’t earn a cent – is thanks to good folk like yourself, subscribing here on Substack. Anyhow, as I crossed the 20k line on Medium, I started to think about potential audience size (not with regards to my Medium blog, but in the world of podcasts and live news).
If you’re UK-based and your antenna is tuned to the goings on of Westminster politics, you’ll know Guido Fawkes. It’s a conservative (read: right-wing) gossip site, which very seldom publishes anything that would be of interest to polite society. But, at the moment, there is a grappling within the heart of Britain’s conservative press for supremacy of the broadcast waves — and Guido can’t keep out of the scuffle. So they’ve been lampooning both GB News and Talk TV (two new television channels that have launched in the past year, attempting to be something like ‘a British Fox’) and that is of vague, amusing interest to me, as a non-partisan observer. Anyhow, the article that piqued my interest was actually this one, titled ‘Too Many Politics Shows Are Chasing Too Few Viewers’.
The premise is simple, and the title descriptive. With the launch of high-profile new programming on TalkTV (including Piers Morgan and Tom Newton Dunne) the market has reached saturation point, and executives are realising that, for all the bluster, not that many people are interested in watching political talk shows. The interesting paragraph reads:
“The British television audience is one fifth the size of the US television audience, which is why Fox News, MSNBC and CNN can make money… In the UK magazines, think tanks and online political enterprises have all launched video shows and podcasts of varying quality to service political geeks. Content that mostly preaches to the choir, be it their readers or the ideologically allied. These are niche ventures that build brand loyalty and increase subscriptions and donations. The Spectator’s family of podcasts drive magazine subscriptions, and are financed by sponsors wanting to be associated with the glossy magazine and reach their affluent readers. On the left, Novara’s professional high production values and left-wing critiques give comrades Sarkar and Bastani a measurably bigger reach than TalkTV, funded largely by the donations of their left-wing fans. One think-tank boss told Guido that if their policy wonk focused videos reach just 500 people, that is ten times as many as would ever turn up to a policy seminar — if one donor likes what they see and makes a £50,000 donation, that pays for a lot of cheaply produced online videos spreading their message.”
What’s being touched upon here is something that I butt my head against pretty regular: the question of potential audience size. If we take the number for your maximum potential audience size to be the figure you’d get if everyone who might ever realistically listen to it did so, then we get the most raw, unfiltered potential audience size. That is audience size for dreamers (or people pitching to clients…) but, like most dreams, it is also a fantasy. It relies upon reaching maximum potential without encountering any of the usual product release frictions — in short, it’s a figure that is useful only in defining a sensational upper boundary.
The Guido Fawkes piece looks at the failure to ignite of both GB News and TalkTV, which makes a perfectly good case study. Here in the UK, there are about 67m people knocking about, of which about 20% are under the age of 18 and about 5% are over the age of 80. So we’re down to about 50m people at this point. Now to apply some vaguer criteria: let’s say that half of those people have ready access to free-to-air TV (I, for example, don’t have any live TV these days), and only a quarter of them have an interest in news programming. That brings us to about 6m, which is roughly the number of people who watch the evening news on the BBC. The question, therefore, is if the maximum potential audience is, say, 6 or 7 million people, and some 6 or 7 million people are already being served content, what is the reality of your potential audience size?
The real issue here is not spillover — those people who are interested in news programming but have not been served it yet — but crossover, people who are willing to move providers. And let’s estimate that 10m would like to consume live news, of which 6m are happily monogamous with the BBC: that means a pool of roughly 4m to divvy out between all the other providers. ITV might take 2m, Channel 4 could scrounge 1m, maybe Channel 5 has a couple of hundred thousand viewers (I have really no idea): the available number of viewers is actually fairly tiny.
This is a problem I encounter a lot in podcasting. Here in the UK, the ultimate podcast market (basically anyone who’s ever listened to a podcast) is somewhere between 15 and 20 million. The vast majority of them are listening to extremely mainstream comedy, true crime or sports products. If you were to tell me that you wanted to create a news podcast, I’d be looking at a different figure. I’d suggest that there are about half a million (to a million) people in the UK who want a news podcast, and there are several hundred shows providing that service. The reality is that, if listeners were apportioned equally, you’d probably get about 700 listeners a pop. But they aren’t divided equally: the top shows will have a six figure audience, while the majority of the rest will have audiences comprising of mum, dad and Sandra, who you met at Club Med in 2008.
Another article that piqued my interest in terms of thinking about potential audience size, was this piece by Adam Bowie, deconstructing the claim that Shagged, Married, Annoyed (a British comedy podcast) has “more than 100m listeners”, made by The Observer newspaper. Bowie basically deconstructs that figure from the premise that it sounds wrong: essentially, it requires huge chunks of every English-language market to be listening to Shagged, Married, Annoyed when the much more likely explanation is that “100m listeners” is a fudged version of “100m listens”. 100m listens spread across 167 episodes gives a per episode figure of around 600,000, which seems much more realistic. Much, much more realistic.
The maximum potential audience size for any UK podcast is about a million weekly listeners, in my opinion. There are many other factors than will push that number down, but I’d put the maximum somewhere near there. Correspondingly, the same maximum potential audience figure in the US should be about 5.5m (which, even as I write it, seems too high). Once you’ve applied all the other criteria, most markets for any given podcast are much smaller than you’d think — and certainly much smaller than you’re led to believe when misleading data like “100m listeners” is bandied about. Understanding the realistic market size and your realistic potential audience is a valuable, even vital, step to assigning yourself the correct objectives for your project. Without that understanding you can easily end up trapped in a loop of over-investment and under-performance, as, I suspect, certainly newly launched cable news stations find themselves. There is always a realistic figure for success, but too often it’s clouded over by a dense fog of obfuscation, braggadocio and outright deception.
I think I mentioned on an edition of this newsletter a few weeks ago, that I wanted to discuss the way that media paywalling is evolving. There are a few different places that I think are doing interesting things in this area, not least the Guardian (who are the most committed anti-paywallers, but are introducing a flexible wall for app users) and Quartz, which has moved in the opposite direction. (I’m also interested in the company Every, which is like Substack except it’s moved away from individual subscriptions and back towards sponsorship funded news).
Anyhow, you’ll note that said article has not yet appeared, for which I can only blame a busy schedule and a persistent cold.
And in the time that I haven’t been writing this piece, Quartz has been sold to G/O Media, who own Gizmodo, The Onion and Deadspin. This is not the first time in its relatively short history that Quartz has been flogged, having been sold by Atlantic Media to Uzabase in 2018, and by Uzabase to its CEO Zachary Seward in 2020.
It’s clear that people in the media still think of ‘business news’ as quite a bankable, resilient sector (just look at how many schmucks are still paying out the nose for a Bloomberg terminal) which perhaps explains why Quartz is persevering with a 100 strong staff, despite $6.9m in losses in 2021. But the move away from a metered paywall is, let’s say, non-typical of this part of the industry, so the impact will be anyone’s guess.
Apologies for the slightly bitty, fragmented nature of this week’s newsletter. I am suffering with a cold, and that is making me groggy and my writing even more circular than usual. So I’ll leave things here. My quote for this week reads thus: Voglio fare con te ciò che la primavera fa con i ciliegi.”
“I want to do with you what spring does to cherry trees” – this, I should note, is not a threat, but a quote from Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Every Day You Play’, translated, presumably, from Spanish into both Italian and English.