The Audio Opportunity
While most companies fight for users' screen time, the rise of spoken-word audio might make ears - not eyeballs - the next frontier of winning users’ attention.
Fuelled by wireless headset adoption and an ever-growing selection of content made for listening, the audio trend represents a major opportunity for any company aiming to be relevant in all those moments users are away from their screens. Although we cannot accurately predict how much total screen time, and news publishers’ share of it, will grow in the coming years, we see clearly that time spent on audio is growing rapidly. Across the world, more and more people listen regularly, and each person listens for longer. In Norway, the share of users listening to podcasts per month nearly doubled from 24% in 2017 to 43% in 2020, with Norwegian-language podcasts leading the charge. Users aged 16 to 24 show the highest adoption, with listeners in this group averaging nearly two hours daily on podcasts or audiobooks. Among Swedish users generally, average time spent on podcast and radio daily already matches that of digital news consumption.
While audio as a product is nothing new per se, there are many ways in which the current move to audio is different from traditional broadcast radio:
It is fueled partially by hardware adoption, led by AirPods’ exponential growth numbers capturing more than a third of the wireless earbuds market, and several other audio headsets seeing double-digit sales growth for the last few years. A 2022 report estimates that 3 in 4 US teens now own AirPods. The convenience of the new devices means people now wear headphones more often and in situations where they previously wouldn’t - even while talking to their friends!
Our mobile devices are always connected, enabling users to listen to any topic any time, while doing other things. The ability to multitask is, as one can expect, one of the main reasons users look to audio in their busy lives.
Lastly, the sheer volume of content is growing rapidly, with an entire publishing industry transitioning to audio books, and all-time-high investments from tech- and media companies going into the podcast industry.
As users move to airpods for consuming content, we have also seen several audio-first startups emerging over the past few years. Industry experts now talk about wearable audio as the first actual mass market adoption of augmented reality devices (link 1, link 2). For many young users, audio is their primary channel for news. Clearly, publishers who want to stay relevant as more and more users move to audio consumption need to find their place in the audio domain.
For our news organizations in Schibsted, understanding the opportunity that comes with audio starts with acknowledging how the newspaper landscape has changed. We’ve gone from a world of physically distributed newspapers, where there was little competition and a general scarcity of information, to a world of unlimited digital distribution and global competition for attention. In this world, news organizations are not just competing against each other, but instead against any company distributing their product on a screen. Those other companies include technology giants with massive budgets and a world-class ability to get users addicted to their products (TikTok users now average(!) more than 1,5 hours daily).
We know that tech-and streaming giants dominate users’ visual attention, and it seems unlikely that news publishers will turn the tide anytime soon. However, in the audio world, it turns out that news as a category gets an outsized share of users’ attention, accounting for 30% of top podcast episodes despite making up only 7% of podcasts. Given that Schibsted already makes Scandinavia’s biggest news podcasts, this represents a major opportunity to build on an existing association with our brands as audio products.
However, increasing audio content production for news organizations does not come without its challenges:
The costs for voice actors and studio time remain high.
Recording and editing takes several times that of actual audio output.
There’s a risk of spending significant resources on content of low interest.
The nature of news being perishable limits the types of content that can be produced without becoming outdated as stories evolve.
Today, Schibsted and other publishers mostly accept the fact that investments in the audio domain are expensive, and that it will be worth the effort in the long run. But while audio production does increase significantly across all our brands, there are also ways that technology can enable us to produce more audio in smarter ways.
Firstly, the need for studios may soon disappear, as cheaper and more mobile recording setups hit the market, with companies like Nomono (which Schibsted recently invested in) challenging the existing workflow and costs associated with high-quality podcast production.
Secondly, for narrated articles we might soon get rid of the need for both studios and narrators entirely as text-to-speech technology matures. Synthetic voices that can read any text input out loud offer some unique advantages. It allows for unlimited production of narrated articles with near zero marginal cost, as it converts a written text into audio within seconds. Since it is connected to the publisher’s CMS, it also allows for the flexibility to update and edit published stories, without ever needing to step into a studio. The fact that it can be scaled to the entire daily article output of a newspaper also means that a user can rely on the feature to listen to any article they prefer, and doing so while commuting or cooking at home. Given that a large part of users cancel their subscriptions because they simply don’t have enough time to sit down and read all the articles they pay for every day, being able to solve this “bad conscience problem” of subscribers might be a key factor in reducing the churn rates most newspapers are seeing.
Early results of experiments with text-to-speech in Aftenposten show that the gap between human and synthetic voices is closing in terms of listener retention, and that users opting for audio consumption complete more of each story when compared to text. Plans of enabling users to save stories for listening later, as well as queuing synthetically narrated articles after its premium flagship podcasts may all lead to more widespread adoption of audio as a mode of news consumption. The result might be a significant increase in the total time users spend engaging with Aftenposten’s journalism on a daily basis.
Looking back at the battle for users’ screen time described earlier, could it be that by focusing on users’ eyeballs, we miss an emerging behavior change which may one day account for the majority of time spent? The next frontier of winning user attention might in fact be about sonic attention, and those who make the right investments into the audio space now might find that they one day will be the giants of the audio world.