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Podcast listening down as people work from home: report

Dan Frommer, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Consumer, spoke with Yahoo Finance about what online media people are consuming as they are quarantined and self-isolating.

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MYLES UDLAND: Let's switch gears now and talk a little bit about what's happening with the work from home trade and the ways that maybe we hadn't realized that is being impacted, or which industries, rather, are being impacted by this change in work habits.

Dan Frommer is the publisher of "The New Consumer," chronicling the D2C economy, Direct to Consumer. And, Dan, you had a piece out last week that really caught my attention, which is podcast listening trending down pretty significantly here.

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And I know I saw this story, and then I thought about my own habits, and I realized, yeah, I'm actually not listening to hardly any podcasts anymore. And it really, I think, just comes down to the fact that we are no longer trying to kill time between getting from our home to the office. The office for many people, the core podcast listener, is now just in the home.

DAN FROMMER: Yeah, it's been interesting. You know, podcasting has been one of the big beneficiaries of putting a computer in everybody's pocket, putting tiny earbuds in everybody's ears, you know, certainly at the expense of things like linear radio.

But when commuting goes down, I don't know, 80%, 90% in big cities like New York, it's been interesting to see some of the second and third degree trends and effects from that.

And one of them that caught my mind and caught my eyes as I've been following the podcasts industry is seeing a pretty substantial downtick in audience size and also in downloads from podcasts. It's a little tricky to measure, because podcasting is a very distributed medium. It's not like there's one source of truth for all this data.

You know, while Apple has the biggest podcasting store and library, it actually doesn't host the files. So you know, this is one of those things where really, we're looking to get as many data points as possible and kind of form a consensus on our own.

And so far, some of the data I've seen-- you know, there's a service called Podtrac, which is the one that I published a chart from. A lot of these kind of aggregators work with, you know, dozens of publishers, thousands of shows, and what they're seeing is that basically, audiences were down, you know, in the single digit to high single digit range, percentage-wise, each of the last couple of weeks.

I also spoke with the developer of Overcast, which is one of the premium podcast players, and he told me two interesting things. One is that weekdays were looking like they were trending down about 20%, but weekends were actually flat.

So you know, podcasting is actually interesting because it peaks during the week. Some media peaks during the weekend. Podcasting peaks during the week, certainly as people are at the gym, or commuting to work, or walking around the city.

And then another interesting stat from him was that CarPlay-- which is Apple's system that lets you listen to or use your iPhone apps in your car-- CarPlay use in his app was down 60%. So you know, not hard to correlate those things. Spending less time in the car, less time on public transportation, therefore less time for podcasts.

ANDY SERWER: Indeed.

DAN FROMMER: And seeing kind of similar stats from other sources emerge over the last couple of days. So looks like it's down about 20% from where things had been immediately previous.

ANDY SERWER: Dan, I want to change topics a little bit and ask you about you--

DAN FROMMER: Ha.

ANDY SERWER: --and your business a little bit, because you're in digital media. You worked at Recode, you worked at Quartz, and now you have your own operation, I gather. And so I'm wondering how you're faring during this and, you know, what it's like to be in new media, digital media during this pandemic.

DAN FROMMER: I mean, it's certainly invigorating. Like, you know, I had been thinking through, you know, my plan for the next several months, my content plan, my business plan. Things I was going to do this year were events, these big research reports on different sectors.

And you know, basically, three weeks ago, I kind of saw things were going in a different direction. And so you know, can't do events right now, and no one wants to read a research paper earnestly about the future of the coffee shop, because we're not going to them.

So the great thing about being one person is that I was able to change my business model overnight. You know, I woke up on Monday-- what was it-- the 16th of March and said, you know what, I'm going to add monthly subscriptions right now, because it's probably going to be harder for people to justify prepaying for a year of my subscription, which is not inexpensive. It's $200 a year for a newsletter that comes out twice a week.

So I added monthly subscriptions in a day. It was very easy for me just to click a few things in the back end and write a blog post announcing them, and then really devote myself from a content perspective immediately, you know, basically 100% to that coronavirus pandemic and the effects it will have on consumer habits and purchasing and the business of the companies that I write about.

And you know, as I'm sure you're seeing, too, like, that's what people want to watch and read and learn more about. So you know, it's tough. I'm stuck in my house just as much as everyone else is. And it's hard to do meetings in person, and--

ANDY SERWER: Right.

DAN FROMMER: I've been ordering in a lot of new products to try them out and learn more about it. But it certainly gives you focus.

You know, and as someone who exists to serve my readers, you know, hopefully I'm helping them in a time of need.

JEN ROGERS: You are a busy guy, and we don't have too much time. But I got to ask you about something near and dear to my heart, and that is airline miles, because you also publish "Points Party."

DAN FROMMER: That's correct.

JEN ROGERS: So real quick, do you think that miles are going to be around on the other side of this? Because the airlines are in a lot of trouble right now.

DAN FROMMER: Yeah, so my--

JEN ROGERS: This worry's out there.

DAN FROMMER: My side project is PointsParty.com, a newsletter about points. Yeah, they're not-- loyalty is not going anywhere. This may be an opportunity for airlines and hotels to make their points worth less going forward.

You always have to worry about what might happen to points programs in a bankruptcy. You know, it's tough.

I would say that people hopefully have bigger things that they're worrying about than points right now. But you know, and hopefully if they're in a need, in a cash crunch, able to put those points towards cash and pay for necessary items, instead of preplanning a trip for the fall. I hope that people are able to do that.

But yeah, that's a great question. And a lot of this is going to depend on maybe some of those bailouts and then how airlines and hotels think about keeping loyal customers, you know, years into the future.

MYLES UDLAND: You know, it's funny. I reflect how much time I spent in 2020-- or 2019-- focusing on my Delta status for this year. And now it just doesn't matter. It's just-- nothing could matter less.

All right. Dan Frommer with "The New Consumer." Thanks so much for calling in. We'll talk to you soon.

DAN FROMMER: Any time.