Since 2020, The Fix has been publishing a look back at the past year in podcasting (2020, 2021), social media (2020, 2021) and subscriptions & memberships (2020, 2021).

There were a few big trends when looking back at the most significant news and events in podcasting in 2022. Without a doubt the rise of YouTube as a huge new player in the podcasting field was probably the most watched development.

Big podcasts hosted by famous people with huge audiences have continued to go exclusive, a move that worried many podcasters that believe that podcasting should be open. Also, it begs that philosophical question whether they are podcasts if they don’t have an open RSS feed.

Consolidation is happening everywhere in the media, so there is no surprise we are seeing it also in podcasting.

Throughout the year, especially in the beginning, Joe Rogan continued to cause headaches to Spotify, and some high-profile artists even called on the platform to remove him or make him stop spreading misinformation and hate speech.

And of course the big trend of the year was that podcasting continued to grow and amass new audiences throughout the whole world.

January 2022

Spotify introduced call-to-action cards for podcast ads. CTA cards appear in the app as soon as a podcast ad begins playing and resurface later on while the listener is exploring the Spotify app. It aims to make it easier to check out the brand, product, or service heard about while listening.

The New York Times bought The Athletic, the subscription-based sports site that publishes a number of popular sports podcasts.

Twitter Spaces added the record feature in the iOS and Android apps. Unfortunately, until this day there isn’t a simple download Spaces audio button. If you want to get it, you either have to wait 24 hours to download it within your profile’s data dump or use a third-party service (I recommend Backstage by Headliner, very easy to use).

Amazon bought the exclusive rights to the My Favorite Murder podcast. The deal required the podcast to be on Amazon Music for a week before general release.

Jad Abumrad, the co-founder and co-host of the widely popular Radiolab podcast stepped aside from hosting the show. For many, Radiolab was a gateway podcast and thanks to the show they started listening to more or producing them.

A backlash against Spotify from artists started after Neil Young removed his music from Spotify criticising “dangerous life-threatening COVID falsehoods found in Spotify programming”. He meant the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

February 2022

The fallout from Joe Rogan’s statements continued when a clip of him saying the N-word more than 20 times was posted on Instagram. The comedian and host recorded a public apology, and according to Podnews, 70 episodes of his show were removed from Spotify. NY Times reporting revealed that Rogan’s 2020 Spotify deal was over $200 million and not $100 million as had been reported before.

Wondery and NPR announced a licensing agreement for “How I Built This” with Guy Raz. New episodes of the popular podcast would be published one week early on Wondery+ and Amazon Music.

Spotify announced the acquisitions of two podcast technology companies, Podsights and Chartable. Podsights is a leading podcast advertising measurement service and Chartable is a podcast analytics platform.

NiemanLab looked at how Joe Rogan became podcasting’s Goliath. His rise is particularly important because it goes beyond the standard partisan political battling that Americans have grown accustomed to in social and broadcast media.

March 2022

In its blog, Rephonic advised podcasters to use more TikTok and less Twitter. According to its findings, new podcasts have an Instagram and Twitter account, but rarely TikTok, yet those few are doing much better in terms of followers and reach.

More from The Fix: Does your podcast need its own social media handle? A look at top podcasts in US, Germany, France and Poland 

Both YouTube and TikTok were reported to work on podcasting. According to Bloomberg, YouTube has been reaching out to podcasters and podcast networks, offering “grants” of up to $300,000 to entice them to create video versions of their shows.

Amazon launched Amp, the live radio app reminiscent of Clubhouse. The company said the app would give users a way to DJ their own live radio shows.

According to research from The Guardian, more listeners pay attention to podcast advertising than ads on TV or radio.

YouTube’s podcasting plans were leaked. According to Podnews, YouTube was looking at ingesting podcast RSS feeds directly, with a new podcasts homepage at youtube.com/podcasts. Podcasts appeared to be promoted with familiar, square, artwork thumbnails. YouTube was to feature audio ads: both sold by Google but also by partners

Spotify suspended its services in Russia, citing the country’s censorship law imposed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

April 2022

Headliner, the popular audio-to-video tool, launched Eddy, an audio and video editing tool that lets you edit audio or video just like text. It’s free in beta.

Substack announced it wants to make it simple to start a paid, subscription-based podcast the same way the platform made it simple to start a paid newsletter. Podcasting via Substack is free until you start a paid tier. After that, Substack takes a cut from your revenue.

Podcast hosting service Anchor, owned by Spotify and one of the biggest podcast hosting platforms globally, became available in 35 different languages, lowering podcasting’s barrier to entry even more. Most podcast hosting services are available only in English with just a few exceptions supporting more languages.

Apple Podcasts Connect added follower count. Podcasters can see some stats broken down for followers and non-followers, such as time listened.

Spotify rebranded its live app Spotify Greenroom into Spotify Live. The Clubhouse clone was also announced to being integrated into the main app with just select original programming

Podnews reported that April 2022 was the first month when the top ten Apple Podcasts chart in Ukraine was full of Ukrainian podcasts for the first time.

May 2022

Facebook pulled the plug on podcasting and its audio endeavours entirely. Even though the social media giant wanted to make audio a “first class citizen” on its platform and Mark Zuckerberg demoed a few new audio features a year before, the company ended short-form features and shut down the audio hub due to focus on building the metaverse.

Spotify’s podcast hosting platform Anchor rolled out video podcasts with a catch – they only work on Spotify. The US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK were in this first batch of countries getting support. RSS feeds and many podcast players support video podcasts as such, but you need to build it on the open platform. This was not that case. (Also in May 2022, Anchor’s co-founder Michael Mignano left Spotify.)

Nielsen’s “Podcasting Today” report revealed that over 50% of daily podcast listeners began listening in the last two years.

According to data from Signal Hill Insights, YouTube became the most popular podcast app in the US.

June 2022

Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, signed a multiyear deal with Amazon’s Audible. The agreement came after a three-year contract with Spotify expired. 

The 7th season of Slow Burn, the award-winning narrative reporting podcast by Slate, launched and later became the Apple Podcasts show of the year; it also appeared on several best of 2022 podcast lists.

Bloomberg reported that some podcasters on Spotify are making $18,000 a month with just publishing white noise.

The Reuters Institute and University of Oxford has released the Digital News Report 2022 and among other things found that 34% of people in surveyed countries listen to podcasts (up from 31% in 2021). Ireland, Sweden and Norway have the most podcast listeners per capital.

The Smart Audio report by Edison Research and NPR found that listening to podcasts via smart-speakers is growing.

Rephonic analysed a database of over 2.5 million podcasts and found that podcasts with guests get more listeners.

Sounds Profitable, the weekly newsletter that examines the business of podcasting, released The Creators, a study of the people who create podcasts (US-only). They skew younger, are more diverse, more educated, with higher income, and Spotify is their most often used service to listen to podcasts.

July 2022

Michael Mignano, the co-founder of Anchor who left Spotify in May, caused some uproar with his piece titled “The Standards Innovation Paradox”. He argued Anchor and Spotify needed to come up with proprietary solutions (like polls, Q&A, video podcasts) because the RSS standard had been stagnant. There were many who opposed such a view in the podcast community.

Acast acquired Podchaser, the “world’s most comprehensive and authoritative podcast database” (the “IMDb of podcasting”) in a deal worth $34 million. Podchaser contains data of more than 4.5 million podcasts, including advertising information. The integration would bring additional data to Acast’s advertisers, Podnews wrote.

The Dutch public broadcaster NPO shared with Podnews the results of some research they did on podcast artwork. They discovered that people prefer: 1) being able to see the title of the show in the artwork, 2) to have an image of the host, and 3) that a publisher logo on thumbnails is preferable to most people. 

August 2022

Podcast guests are paying up to $50,000 to appear on popular shows, and the podcasts don’t disclose it, according to Bloomberg. After interviewing nearly a dozen people within the industry, reporter Ashley Carman found that the practice is particularly popular among podcasts in the wellness, cryptocurrency, and business arenas.

Eurobarometer’s Media & News 2022 survey found that European Gen Z consume more news via podcasts (10%) than older generations (2%).

November 2022

Research from German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF about audio consumption on the internet found that podcast listening in the country more than doubled in the last four years, going from 19% to 40% of German adults listening to podcasts at least once a month. The research also found 30% listen weekly, up from 14% in 2019. And Spotify is the most used podcast listening platform, followed by Amazon Music and YouTube.

Spotify rolled out its video podcasting capabilities to creators in more than 180 markets worldwide. The functionality became available in nearly all the markets where Spotify’s podcast creation software, Anchor, was currently available.

YouTube published a comprehensive guide for podcasting on the platform. It also promoted its monetisation option with the YouTube Partner Program. It was yet another sign in 2022 that the video giant is serious about podcasting.

December 2022

YouTube launched its first official trends podcast called Like & Describe. It promised to go behind YouTube’s biggest trends and get the inside scoop from creators and experts, while bringing insights you can’t find anywhere else.

The best podcasts of 2022 lists were published:

Spotify published its most popular podcasts list globally in 2022:

  • The Joe Rogan Experience (for the third year running)
  • Call Her Daddy
  • Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain (a soon-to-be-Spotify Exclusive)
  • Caso 63 (a Spotify Original podcast that’s debuted in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, and English; counted with all its language iteration feeds combined)
  • Crime Junkie (the only non-exclusive podcast on the list)

Slow Burn: Roe v. Wade, a four-episode instalment about the forgotten history of abortion, was awarded The Apple Podcasts Show of the Year title. The show also released six new extra episodes which are exclusive to Apple Podcasts

Audible published 10 of the best new podcasts of 2022. As with Spotify, many of them are Audible originals, meaning available only on the Amazon-owned platform. If you sense a pattern here, you are not alone.

Apple later also revealed the rest of its most popular podcasts of 2022 lists. Audiochuck, the Indianapolis-based network, was the top free channel on Apple Podcasts for the second year in a year (followed by The New York Times and iHeartPodcasts). And the Crime Junkie from Audiochuck was the most listened to show, as well as the most followed and most shared show in the U.S. Apple wrote that year-end charts were available to listeners in nearly 100 countries and regions.

Generative AI is also coming to help podcasters as AudioLabs launched to help them make videos from audio-only content for better promotion on YouTube Shorts, Reels and TikTok. Some examples are really eye-grabbing, like this one or this one.

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