The history of podcasting has two major turning points. The first came in 2014, the year Serial premiered. The second is happening right now. nwquah writes
The history of podcasting can be told in three stages. Photo: Vulture and Getty Images You have to admit: “Podcast” is a silly word. Sure, it’s no sillier than “YouTube” or “TikTok,” perhaps, and the portmanteau logic of combining the words “iPod” and “broadcast” is generally defensible. But the word retains a makeshift feel even to this day — which is fitting, I suppose, given its origins as an afterthought.
The First Era: The Pioneers Going all the way back to the medium’s creation, podcasting was mostly defined by its blogging roots. Both worlds shared a similar political spirit in that, much like the early bloggers, the development of podcasting was largely motivated by a belief in the internet’s ability to democratize speech, a desire to circumvent gatekeepers, and an impulse to exist and create on one’s own terms.
In any case, podcasting kept growing in listenership, slowly but steadily, despite the relatively slow uptake of actual business. It even continued to do so through the Great Recession. According to Edison Research, which has tracked podcast listening going back to 2006, listenership kept growing slightly through the latter half of the aughts — two percentage points between 2008 and 2010 — even as what little investment money there was dried up and some podcast creators began to pull back.
Maybe. But Serial’s late 2014 debut is nonetheless a strong historical marker. To wit: According to Edison Research, the number of monthly podcast listeners in America practically doubled in the five years after 2014, from around 39 million Americans to an estimated 90 million. In the five years preceding 2014, the same metric grew by only 35 percent.The years following the late 2014 moment saw an insane flurry of podcast activity.
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