Morris touts everyone from Shaq to Steve Austin and Kaitlyn Bristowe to Tip "T.I." Harris before he delves into more meat and potatoes around the Super Listener study that PodcastOne just completed with Edison Research. PodcastOne released the day of our conversation, during the recentIAB Podcast Upfront.
Part of his passion for podcasting is summed up in this comment: "A single podcast is never going to be the biggest form of media, but it is the most valuable audience in media. It cannot be faked. Everybody in the digital video universe who was working to scale their business through growth hacks and through SEO and other things … were missing out on the core foundation: that the strength of your audience — the commitment and the ability to mobilize it and monetize it, ultimately, when they land where you want them to land — is what makes these businesses last and grow exponentially valuable."
Here's a topline of how he went from Funny or Die and IMAX to helm founder Norm Pattiz's seven-year-old company, which was born years before anyone even dreamed of asking Siri to play a podcast.
Listen to the full podcast right here, and please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple, GooglePodcasts, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and YouTube. The following is edited for length and clarity.
Moss: Describe the research you just presented with Tom Webster of Edison Research on the super fan — those who listen to podcasts the most hours per week.
Morris: The study [is]…based on anybody listening for five or more hours of podcasts a week ... who have adopted this consumer habit and made it part of their daily ritual. It speaks to them. Half the people in this survey actually fit into a category where they're listening to over eight hours a week. Some of them 12 hours. These are the people [who] care about this medium the most.… They're the canaries in the coal mine; indicators of broader trends we're going to see. And they're growing [partly because] people are really conscious of the value of time, especially time alone.