One of the stranger things about working in media is how much time we spend assuming audiences think about media the way we do.
Podcast people talk about podcast listeners. Newsletter people talk about newsletter readers. YouTube people talk about YouTube audiences. Companies organize themselves around those distinctions too, with separate podcast, social, video, and newsletter teams, each with their own calendars and metrics. And somewhere in the middle is usually a content strategist trying to remind everybody that all of these teams are talking to the same human beings. (That content strategist was usually me. 😵💫)
I was thinking about this after reading some recent research from Sounds Profitable. The share of monthly podcast consumers who reported listening in exactly one genre increased from 12% in 2025 to 16% this year. That doesn't necessarily mean those people literally listen to one podcast and nothing else, but the researchers described a growing group of "one-show wonders" whose podcast consumption is extremely narrow.
What really caught my attention was how those people found their favorite shows. YouTube was well ahead of podcast apps, advertisements on other podcasts, and recommendations from other hosts, which made me wonder whether some of these people are really "podcast listeners" at all (at least in the way the podcast industry likes to think about them).
Maybe they just found something they like. There’s a difference.
I made Revision Path for eleven years, and I'm pretty sure a meaningful percentage of the audience wasn't waking up every Monday thinking, "Boy, I sure do love podcasts." They were interested in Black designers or creative careers or hearing people speak honestly about navigating industries where they weren't always expected to be. The podcast just happened to be where those conversations lived. The medium was useful, but the subject was the reason.
I think media companies forget about this. You develop a successful podcast and immediately start thinking about how to get those listeners into another podcast. You build an audience around a newsletter and assume the logical extension is another newsletter. The problem is trying to turn audience affinity into format loyalty.
Spoiler alert: the audience may not care.
They might care about that particular person or that particular subject. They might trust the editorial judgment behind one property and be willing to follow it somewhere else, but only if what they find there is still worth their time. That's different from being a fan of the medium itself.
And honestly, I think that's healthier. I don't need someone to love podcasting. I need them to care about the work.
Another study from this week reinforced this point for me. Research on digital audio consumption in France found that people move fairly freely between platforms. More than half of respondents said they'd started listening to something on one platform and finished it somewhere else. A significant number of people using video platforms for audio also said they weren't actually watching the video.
So someone might discover a conversation through YouTube, finish listening to it somewhere else, read something from the creator later, and never spend much time thinking about what category any of those things belong to.
That sounds perfectly normal to me. The industry is the one obsessed with the categories, but the audience is trying to get what it came for.
And this is where content strategy starts getting more interesting, because if audiences aren't necessarily loyal to formats, then organizing your entire editorial operation around formats begins to look a little strange. (Believe me, I’ve been there.)
I mean, imagine a company where one team owns podcasts, another owns YouTube, another owns newsletters, and another owns social. Each team has its own goals, metrics, publishing schedule, and ideas about what the audience wants. Meanwhile, the person on the other side of all of this just wants useful information about one subject. We've somehow managed to make the organizational chart the audience's problem.
I think this also explains why so much cross-promotion feels useless. If someone listens to a show about Black design history, telling them "here's another podcast from our network" doesn't necessarily mean anything. Why should they care? But if you tell them, "This conversation expands on something that came up in the episode you just heard," now you've given them a reason to continue.
The connection is editorial, not organizational.
That's the difference between recommending something because it belongs to your company and recommending something because it belongs in the audience's world. I think Revision Path worked partly because the editorial premise was clear enough that people understood what kind of value they could expect even though the guests and conversations changed every week. One episode might be about graphic design. Another might move into technology, education, entrepreneurship, race, culture, or some combination of all of those things. But there was a reason they belonged together. The show documented the work and experiences of Black designers, developers, and other creative professionals.
That was the connective tissue. Not "this is a podcast."
And now that the show isn't publishing anymore, that distinction is even more obvious to me. The archive still makes sense because the editorial idea still makes sense. Nobody has to care about podcasts to find an interview from ten years ago useful. They need to care about the person in it, the subject being discussed, or the history being documented.
That's also why I've become more interested in what can be done with the archive as an archive instead of simply treating it as a long list of old episodes. If someone is researching Black designers working in Atlanta during the 2010s, there should be a way to find those conversations. If someone wants to understand how Black creative professionals talked about diversity in tech before and after 2020, there's material there. And if someone wants to follow a person's career across several interviews, companies, or creative disciplines, that should be possible too.
None of those people need to identify as podcast listeners. They need to be able to find the information.
That's a content problem. And increasingly, I think it's the content problem.
We've spent an enormous amount of time optimizing for platforms. Maybe we should spend more time optimizing for curiosity instead. What does somebody want to know? Who do they trust to explain it? What else would genuinely help them once they get there? Where should the work lead next? Those are harder questions than "how do we increase podcast downloads?"
They're also considerably more useful.
Formats, platforms, and audience habits change. Whatever terminology the industry is using this year will eventually change too. The thing people care about is usually much simpler.
They found something useful. They found somebody interesting. They found a perspective they trusted.
And they came back.
That doesn't necessarily make them podcast fans. It makes them your audience.
There's a difference.