Watching the Podcast Bubble Burst From the Inside

I started my first podcast in 2009. It wasn’t anything special, just a venue to practice documentary audio and force myself to publish something every two weeks. I was a kindergarten teacher in New York City, trying to figure out how to break into public radio. What I couldn’t have imagined then was that within less than a decade, I’d find myself inside a podcast industry bubble — a bubble that many of us correctly suspected would eventually pop. 

The podcast industry didn’t really announce itself until 2014, when the podcast Serial hit. I was working on a small, nationally-syndicated public radio history show. A good portion of our listenership came from podcasts, like many other public radio offerings. But everything felt different when Serial dropped. Practically overnight, friends and relatives who had never once mentioned a podcast I’d worked on were asking my opinion about whether I thought the show’s subject, Adnan Syed, was guilty. Serial reaction podcasts sprang up, as well as tongue-in-cheek reaction podcasts to the reaction podcasts. The show was mainstream enough that Saturday Night Live parodied it. 

Over the next few years, everyone I knew in public radio could feel the shift. Podcasts were no longer a side project. Investors poured money into start-ups like Gimlet Media, which made a hit meta podcast about starting the company. My public radio colleagues were going for-profit — getting hired, starting companies, raising capital.

I jumped as well. I left my job and circulated my name. Soon, Slate Magazine contacted me to produce what was supposed to be a one-off series about Watergate, eventually called Slow Burn. The host was a mid-career print journalist named Leon Neyfakh who would become the most significant creative collaborator of my career. 

When we launched Slow Burn, it was a surprise hit when having a podcast hit meant something. On Tuesday mornings, friends of mine at NPR said their Slack channels buzzed with reactions. Every time we published a new episode, I would look at Twitter on my commute to work and scroll through a Greek chorus of hot takes. The Onion parodied it. It was a clue on Jeopardy. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years texted when they spotted my name in the credits. I was traveling to L.A. to sit through award ceremonies. And when Slate sold the Slow Burn IP to TV, Leon decided we should start a company to own the work we create. 

We founded Prologue Projects in 2018. At the time, there were multiple growth strategies in the industry. Some shops courted venture capital, like Gimlet. Others, like Pineapple Street Media, built work-for-hire portfolios. Many companies generally relied on a combination of ads that ran on their podcasts, selling the stories they reported as intellectual property to be turned into television or films, and corporate-branded content. The corporate piece was especially interesting. A major beverage company, for example, would pay a healthy sum for a series on a topic adjacent to the brand. Then the podcast company could take part of that excess profit to help fund creative risk-taking ventures. Leon wanted a different path: fewer shows, big budgets, high-touch production, and most of the money coming from companies that paywalled content like Luminary and Audible. He liked to say we were more like an indie record label than a corporate studio. It wasn’t the way to make millions, but it was the way to make shows that we were proud of. 

What I enjoyed most in this era was how many oddball ideas got off the ground. Shows like The Habitat (about a group of people who volunteered for a terrestrial mission simulating life on Mars), Winds of Change (about the history of Cold War espionage and heavy metal) and The Ballad of Billy Balls (about the murder of punk musician Billy Balls) all took chances with niche concepts without any idea of an ending. Pineapple Street Media launched The 11th to put out a new, experimental piece of audio on the 11th day of every month. Articles buzzed about this being the “golden age” of podcasting, and the output largely justified the label.  

Even then, though, many of us actively talked about how the industry was in a bubble. I heard through the grapevine that the corporate podcasts didn’t have much listenership. Ad sales boomed, but so did budgets for big risk-taking shows that might not be hits. And we could see that a small number of the shows optioned by Hollywood actually ended up being realized. So personally, I tried to treat it like one. My girlfriend and I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in an inexpensive neighborhood. I focused on paying off my student loans and saving money for a house, which we bought when New York City’s housing market dipped in 2020. 

By 2023, we could see the industry shrinking. Ad revenue declined, Hollywood cooled on IP acquisitions, and investor dollars slowed. Nearly every major podcast outlet from Spotify to NPR went through rounds of layoffs. The jobs that remained were increasingly focused on “always-on” chat shows or low-lift formats that promised steadier ad revenue than painstaking, narrative documentaries. The podcast bubble had finally popped. Artificial intelligence became the focus of new investment. “Having a podcast” became the new “having a blog.” 

Earlier this year, a friend of mine convened a happy hour that he called “a wake for podcasting.” It was the night before a major podcast conference in Brooklyn, right across from the hotel that was housing the conference. Dozens of people throughout the industry attended. Most people I talked to shared their stories of layoffs and struggle. Those who had jobs were worried about how long they’d last. I shared my news that Prologue Projects was laying off all of its staff and I was leaving. It was hard to see an industry of upstart creatives drown their sorrows and wonder what’s next. While none of this was a surprise to those of us who talked about the bubble bursting for years, when the moment arrived, it was still a shock. 

And yet, podcasting isn’t dead. From my conversations with people across the industry, there is still money in specific content areas like true crime, wellness, finance, and comedy — especially if you have a big name attached and a low-production format. Large podcast companies started to see double-digit growth again last year on those types of shows. But ambitious journalistic series and oddball concepts aren’t as well-funded or ever-present as they were just half a decade ago. There are fewer jobs, and what were once full-time gigs are largely temp work.

Of course, now that I have more free time, I have a list of small, experimental podcast ideas that wouldn’t have any market outside of a cult favorite. At lunch a few months ago, a friend told me that this is the era where you can’t wait for funding for those types of ideas. You just have to create them in your spare time. 

It occurred to me that in some ways, that’s a return to the beginning. When I was publishing a podcast from my living room, shows like 99 Percent Invisible, the Memory Palace, and Love + Radio were all getting off the ground as passion projects. That spirit is what made the industry in the first place, and it may also be what sustains the most groundbreaking audio of the next decade.