One of the defining notes of our age is how everyone can be a publisher of content. No more being beholden to a major media conglomerate for our news, entertainment or reading material. With precious few limitations and restrictions, now literally anyone who has access to the internet can create programs or publications and make them available to any person to read, listen or watch. That's not lowering the barrier to entry, that's eliminating it.
That has meant that the supply side has exploded. Comparisons are hard to make as the landscape has so completely changed. But as a point of reference consider the shape of the television broadcast industry. As late as the mid 1970's, if you wanted to curl up and be a couch potato, your choices were one of three commercial networks plus what we now know as PBS. Added to that was a smattering of UHF and cable outlets with very limited reach, most of which were just rebroadcasting the major networks and producing almost no original programming. And of course, there was no internet.
Fast forward to the present day and there are hundreds of channels and networks, including specialty providers like ESPN, Home Shopping Network and CNN, and boutique providers like Hulu, Netflix and BritBox. And that doesn't even count YouTube, where most of the content comes from individuals vs. companies. At last report there were more than 114 million YouTube channels. To that smorgasbord are added more than 150,0000 new videos every minute. At an average length of 4.4 minutes, that's around 330,000 new hours of content for you to watch every 60 minutes. If you started to watch just what is up there at this moment (putting aside that more is added every second), it would take 17,810 years to get through the current postings. Better make sure your phone is charged.
It's the same for whatever medium you examine. Art, books, audio, poetry: with no gatekeepers needed, the deluge continues. There are sports, true crime, fan fiction and a host of others, not to mention virtually every sub-sub-sub genre of those you can think of. Most of these efforts garner audiences numbering in the single or double digits at best, with just a few breaking out to achieve widespread consumption. But that doesn't stop creators from putting them out there, and hoping their piece is the one that catches fire.
There are even new art forms that didn't exist a few years ago, let alone have a distribution platform. Up until about 2000, if you wanted to listen to a program that was audio-only, you turned on the radio. Then "podcasting" made an appearance, enabling users to download and listen to any show when they wanted. And today, according to podcastindex.org, there are north of 4 million audio-on-demand programs available for your aural pleasure. Indeed, someone (maybe you) is listening right now: as of 2023, 42% of Americans ages 12 and older have listened to a podcast in the past month, up three and a half times from 10 years ago.
While exact numbers are hard to come by as distribution is fragmented, the most popular programs garner huge audiences. The runaway leader is "The Joe Rogan Experience" with around 11 million downloads per episode, followed by "The Daily" from The New York Times and "This American Life," usually heard on National Public Radio. A good bit further down the list is "Weird Parents" featuring episodes like "Should You Let Your Kids Swear?", "Podcast But Outside" where the hosts set up in different locations and interview random strangers who walk by (and pay them a dollar for appearing), and "What Ever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's", a topic which requires so much explanation that they are currently breaking the 300 episode barrier.
This all means that we have an embarrassment of riches as never before. Whether you want to read, listen or watch, your problem isn't having choices, it's making them. Thankfully you have nothing better to do, right? Which leads to the existential question: did we have so much free time with nothing to do that we created podcasts? Or did we have to create podcasts because we had so much free time and nothing to do? And if the answer is neither, then who is listening to all this stuff?
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Marc Wollin of Bedford can't take enough long walks to stay current on his feeds. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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