• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, November 1, 2019

Forrester is out with advertising and media predictions for the coming year. Among them is this: The podcast sector will blossom into the next $1 billion media market.

That would be pretty sharp growth. The research firm notes the podcast market topped $400 million in 2018, citing an estimate by the IAB.

By the end of 2020, Forrester predicts the medium “could easily top $1 billion.” Why?

The same reason any other medium grows — consumers are spending more time with it. The firm cited a Spotify reveal that it saw a 250% rise in podcast consumption hours in 2018 versus the prior year.

Overall in the U.S., adults spend more than three hours a week listening to online audio content. Listeners also tend to be fairly high on the socioeconomic scale.

“So advertisers want to get in front of these consumers with lots of disposable income, and publishers want to deliver their content in new ways to continue making money,” Forrester concludes.

The firm also predicts that big U.S. retailers with a lot of online traffic will try to monetize that traffic in the form of media platforms. That’s a bit of a trend already that Forrester sees expanding sharply next year. Indeed, it has clients asking it for advice on ways to do it.

“All retailers with over 50 million monthly site visitors will either build out their own self-serve ad tools for brands or partner with advertising technology firms like Criteo or service providers like Triad Retail Media to monetize the traffic they see on their sites,” Forrester predicts.

“Amazon pulled in over $10 billion in advertising revenue in 2018, which woke up other retailers,” the research firm asserts. “Walmart will have self-serve ad tools by the end of 2019.”

The trend will bloom as retailers “try to diversify their businesses and open up new, lucrative, and high-margin revenue streams.”