Niche podcasts are great, but make sure your audience in big enough
Joseph Lichterman, Lenfest Institute,The Boston Globe and WBUR partnered up to launch a sports podcast, but ultimately they quit. They shared a little bit about their experience with The Lenfest Institute.
Production was too tough and they had a hard time keeping up with the news cycle and producing the podcast. Even though they recorded daily, by the time some listeners got the the podcast, it was out of date.
Another lesson from the experiment: Definitely identify niche audiences, but make sure you can monetize them.
…As you research and think about areas where you think a podcast — or any product, really — could serve an audience, you also need to be thinking if that audience will be big enough to monetize. That’s one of the inherent challenges of local podcasts, and some of the most commercially successful podcasts produced by local news organizations, such as the LA Times’ Dirty John, are the ones that have been able to break out of their local markets and reach wider audiences.