A few hunches I have for the world of podcasting in the coming 12 months.

1. Awards Shows: Podcasting categories will appear more regularly within vertical-specific awards shows (i.e. Music, Gaming, Law etc.
2. Specialist Creative Agencies: There’s still a pretty big opportunity to provide creative and/or technical agency services to businesses and individuals looking to break into podcasting. A few offerings like this already exist – expect it to become more formalised and sophisticated in 2019. This shift has happened with all kinds of other content creation on the internet – from building Dreamweaver websites to SEO advice. It’ll keep happening in podcasting too.
3. IMDB for podcasts: We have still yet to see the killer database of people making interesting things happen in the world of podcasting, especially those behind the scenes. A few companies getting into this but no one’s quite nailed it yet and things are still very fragmented. Feels like 2019 could be the year for a couple of these to break out
4. Long-tail sponsorship: Sponsorship of the top-end podcasts by growth startups has become so ubiquitous that it’s moved into meme territory (and this has been the case for a while – see this from the Atlantic back in 2015). The long tail is starting to open up but it’s not easy, especially with listener data insights still being pretty limited/opaque/variable (depending on your viewpoint). Anchor recently launched their sponsorship marketplace offering – it’ll be interesting to see how it takes with both advertisers and producers.