2023: A Bad Year for Podcasting
The year in review and a new website!
2023 was, without a doubt, a bad year for podcasting. For a summary, see this article on the bloodbath. In January 2023, advertising revenue collapsed, shows with lavish budgets were forced to make cuts, and many podcasting companies (like Stitcher) were shut down permanently. New Books Network made about 1/3 of the advertising revenue in 2023 as we did in 2022. The NBN has been around for 14 years now, and for the first 8 years, the project generated essentially no revenue at all. We always viewed the pandemic podcast boom as a period of irrational exuberance, and we planned accordingly. The 2023 podcast advertising bust was something we expected, so we made sure to limit our costs and use the additional revenue we made to do things like save, reward hosts, and support great, scholarly projects like H-Net.
Despite the bad year in terms of money, 2023 was still a great year for New Books Network. While revenue has declined, our listenership has remained steady. We reach about 500,000 people a month. We published 3,600 interviews in 2023, the most ever! The NBN library continues to grow, with nearly 25,000 episodes. In total, NBN interviews were listened to nearly 18 million times. We now have listeners in every country in the world (except North Korea).
2023 was also the year we set a big, new project in motion: In 2024 we will launch a new and improved website. The website will have more visuals, “in the news” highlights, listener accounts that give personalized recommendations and allow users to save episodes for later, and a page with discount offers available at university presses. These are just the tip of the iceberg. We will announce new features throughout the year, so stay tuned.
The New Books Network community is truly one of the best in the world. Our hosts, guests, and listeners are some of the most passionate and intellectually curious people. Every day, we get emails from people everywhere telling us how valuable NBN is to them. For so many, the NBN is a life raft of free, educational information. It’s messages like these that keep us going, and it’s why we remain so optimistic about the future of scholarly podcasting.
Thank you all for supporting us in our mission of public education. All that we ask is that you tell a friend or two about the New Books Network. We wish you all a bright and intellectually engaging 2024.
