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Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I hope that you all had a lovely holiday: thanks were given, food was eaten, items were purchased, and whatnot. But my sincerest wish—because this blog series can also be sincere (don’t tell anybody)—is that you got to spend time with the people who mean the most to you. And if you did spend time with these people, and if that time was anything like the time I spent with the important people in my life, then it’s fairly likely that at some point you all ended up food-coma’d out around some kind of screen, consuming media together.
While television is still central to most people’s media consumption—when you visualized people gathering around a screen, you probably didn’t picture them in front of a phone—it’s no secret that things are rapidly shifting. This being a media-related blog series and all, I figured I should cover this shift. Especially since, as you might have already guessed, creators are playing a key role in it.
As recently reported by Edison Research, podcasts are serving as a Great Disruptor in the media space, with the popular format taking on a central consumption format for younger audiences, especially Gen Z. After struggling to realize their viral potential in a solely audio form, videos of podcasts—whether full episodes or short-form clips—are all the rage on social media. In fact, the ‘podcast video’ phenomenon has gotten so powerful that a single platform has emerged as U.S. listeners’ top destination for podcasts.
It’s not Spotify. It’s not Apple Music. And despite how often these blog posts hype it up, it’s not TikTok, either.
It’s our old friends at YouTube:
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(Thanks to Edison Research for the image. And, you know, the research.)
So let’s see. Here we have a story about:
- The rise of podcasting
- How that rise is fueled by YouTube
- How Gen Z audiences are behind it all
Sounds neat! But as you know, we tend to focus on brand-driven examples here at HBBIP. So if there were some kind of *magical* brand whose data confirmed all these trends, while also painting a compelling growth story, well then sure, I’d probably profile that brand this week. But surely such a thing is impossible. Right?
The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): iHeartMedia
Well gee, how convenient.
There’s no better brand to demonstrate the current state of podcasting than iHeartMedia. While the brand might have risen to prominence largely thanks to the radio (for any Gen Z readers, it’s like a podcast you could listen to in your car), iHeartMedia has gone all in on the podcasting game. I know this because they’re rightfully proud to market iHeartPodcasts as “the world’s #1 podcast publisher,” with 174.2M monthly downloads.
By my calculations, that’s a lot of downloads. What does that look like from an Earned Media Value perspective?
iHeart Media EMV: 2018 - 2024
This does seem to corroborate the fact that podcasts are bigger than ever before. We’ll keep an eye on that dip in 2020 and 2021, but first, let’s see how this timeframe looks when we examine other metrics.
iHeart Media Number of Creators: 2018 - 2024
Interesting. No sign of a dip here—just steady growth. This indicates that in 2020-2021, a stable creator population just wasn’t generating the same degree of engagement and impressions as other years. This could be a matter of programming, but it’s more likely a platform problem. We’ll take a look at the platform data in a second, but just real quick, we’ll check out iHeartMedia’s post count over the years. These stats are rarely so different from EMV and number of creators, so I doubt this is going to throw a wrench in anything, but you know, doing due diligence just in case:
iHeart Media Number of Posts: 2018 - 2024
I had to make sure that I input the data correctly, and then that I was reading this right, but this wacky graph is accurate. Our U.S. creator panel picked up 141.8k posts about iHeartMedia from January to October 2024—almost triple the 51.2k posts we saw in 2023.
To put it simply: what gives?
You might think that relative to other forms of creator content, podcasts don’t yield that many actual posts. After all, a podcast is typically a long-form conversation, with any segments from this conversation requiring at least a little context, while most creators can share quick photos or video snippets about pretty much anything. You can post 10 times a day, but it’s hard to record 10 podcasts worth listening to in a single day.
But oh, you poor simple strawman, don’t you see that context isn’t required anymore? Many people are consuming podcasts in full, but more often than not they’re seeing contextless segments, rather than a complete conversation.
Whether those segments are shared on Instagram Stories or Reels, on TikTok, or via YouTube Shorts, they’re the contemporary currency on which much of current media is built. As noted in this incisive article from New York Magazine (and citing research from media newsletter Garbage Day), video clips of podcasts have gotten so popular and ubiquitous across social media that certain brands and creators are starting to adopt the podcast format for other content, essentially promoting shows that don’t actually exist.
So like I said, context schmontext.
Which brings us back to the post count point. Content about iHeartMedia is pretty prolific everywhere, although in terms of sheer per platform totals, it doesn’t necessarily paint the picture you might expect:
Platforms and YoY Change
From January to October 2024, it was actually Instagram that produced a sizable plurality of iHeartMedia’s total posts. And we see this frequency born out by the engagement garnered by each platform, because more posts means more opportunities for likes, comments, and shares:
iHeart Media Platform Engagement: 2020 - 2024
But when it comes to impressions—the number of people actually seeing/listening to/generally consuming content—that’s where YouTube’s key role is confirmed:
iHeart Media Platform Impressions: 2020 - 2024
After a stark discrepancy in 2022, video clips of podcasts started closing the gap, with YouTube pulling ahead as of this year. Despite boasting a smaller total post count than Instagram, those YouTube posts are viewed more widely. In fact, from January to October 2024, all of iHeartMedia’s top 10 EMV-driving pieces of content, and sixteen of its top 20, came from YouTube.
We can see further evidence of iHeartMedia’s absolutely prolific creator community when we look at the brand’s top advocates. Here are just a few of the big names and post totals associated with iHeartMedia year to date:
Top Posts Year To Date
Podcasts, radio shows, and television programs galore, and they’re all mentioning iHeartMedia in a ton of posts. Just look at The Breakfast Club or Enrique Santos with 2.9k posts in 10 calendar months. Those are Rick Ross for Luc Belaire numbers!
So there you have it, folks. In the rise of iHeartMedia, we can see all the trends that are reshaping the media landscape: ascendant podcasts, more video clips, and the resurgence of YouTube amongst Gen Z consumers. It won’t be long before we’re all following up Thanksgiving dinner by gathering around the television not for football or a movie, but for some podcast clips. And by “won’t be long,” I mean that it’s already here.
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