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Podcast subscription businesses are maturing. As podcasters continue to develop this revenue stream, they face a challenge that publishers have grappled with for years: churn.
It was a topic that came up at last week’s On Air Fest podcast business summit. More podcast subscription offerings are hitting annual milestones, meaning more data is coming in, and podcasters can start tracking how many subscribers they’re able to retain year over year.
Churn is “certainly becoming an increasing priority, particularly for some of our longer-lived subscriptions,” said David Stern, founder and CEO at Supporting Cast, Slate Group’s podcast subscription hosting business.
In a subscription’s first year, monthly churn rates should be below 1% per month, or, ideally, even below 0.5%, according to Stern. A subscription that’s been around for five to 10 years should have a monthly churn below 3%, he added.
During a breakout session at the event, a podcast executive said one of the things they’re doing to tackle churn is adding promos for shows into another show’s channel so that subscribers can hear about other podcasts that might be of interest to them.
“There’s nothing in the technology that’s going to algorithmically serve it … at least for us,” they said. “For us, it’s trying to figure out how to connect those dots so that people are constantly coming back for more, but it’s very manual for us.”
Steve Ackerman, evp and head of global podcasts at Sony Music Entertainment, said during the session that Sony Music rebranded its true crime podcast bundle subscription offering, “The Binge,” last fall, in part to reduce churn. The idea was to make it clearer to subscribers all of the content they were getting with the bundle, so that when they subscribed to listen to one podcast they were aware of the other shows now available to them. “The Binge” releases a new series every month.
For Podimo, a Danish podcast subscription service startup, the company announced this week it hit the milestone of 1 million podcast subscribers. Sachin Doshi, Podimo’s chief content officer, told Digiday that the company has a goal of six-month retention for 60% of its subscriber base. Part of that strategy is offering more content in between the main weekly episodes of a show, such as comments and polls in Podimo’s app. Doshi declined to share Podimo’s churn rate, though he said he’s “happy but not satisfied with our churn.”
“If we can get somebody to listen three days a week, they’re pretty safe for us. Time matters too, but it’s really the number of times you go back and listen. The number of days you go back and listen is the most indicative of retention,” Doshi said during the On Air Fest breakout session.
One way to try to mitigate churn is to offer annual discounts, usually including at least two free months in an annual subscription, Stern said. Another tactic Supporting Cast uses is automatically replacing subscriber-exclusive show feeds added by churned subscribers with a free, ad-supported version of the feed. Promos from hosts appear as mini-episodes encouraging a listener to rejoin to access subscriber-only benefits, sometimes offering a subscription discount.
Supporting Cast is able to do this in podcast apps with private RSS feeds, like Apple Podcasts and YouTube Music. Spotify, on the other hand, doesn’t have that same functionality but lets podcasters insert paywalled episodes into free podcast feeds and banners to push free listeners to paid content.
Supporting Cast has found that certain categories of content are associated with higher churn rates — specifically, seasonal or serialized shows and influencer-hosted shows with newer audiences are more likely to have higher churn rates, compared to always-on shows.
Supercast, another podcast subscription hosting platform, offers tools to fight churn, like allowing subscribers to pause their plan for up to three months, and presenting special prices to retain paying listeners.
Patreon launched a free memberships tier in June 2023, for both listeners who aren’t willing to pay for a membership and for subscribers who want to take a break from paid membership (for example, those who subscribe to listen to a new season of a show, and then unsubscribe once they’re done). Patreon offers creators tools such as Autopilot, which identifies potential subscribers and emails them a discount for their first month, according to a Patreon spokesperson.
Execs at Supporting Cast and Patreon said they are currently testing more features to help podcasters reduce churn.
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