The Rise, Rise, And Rise Of Podcasts

THE SHORT HISTORY of podcasts—how and when and why they went from the nichiest, wonkiest content platforms to a star-studded, self-contained media ecosystem with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual advertising revenue—comes down to three turning points, each of which triggered a wave of growth bigger than the last and only one of which has to do with murder.

- Nicholas Quah

The first came in 2005, less than two years after the launch of the first mainstream podcast to have an RSS feed (Christopher Lydon’s Open Source), when Apple offered more than 3,000 free podcasts on iTunes. Steve Jobs explained that Podcasting was like “TiVo for radio,” which sounded cutting edge at the time because it kind of was. No pesky commercials! F-bombs for everyone! The iTunes push meant podcasts became more discoverable to millions of people who otherwise would have had no idea they existed.