Introduction: The Video Hype Cycle

I have a prediction within a prediction.

The first prediction is that the massive, corporate-fueled video rush we are seeing right now is going to break and deconstruct. The second prediction—the one living right inside the first—is that when that collapse happens, the slow, earthy, intimate core of podcasting will be the only thing left standing, stronger and more sustainable than ever.

All of this talk right now about the video side of podcasting is experiencing the exact same hype cycle that we saw during COVID. Right before COVID hit—when everything went a little wacky—a shift was already starting. In 2019, podcasting was beginning to pick up, but to be completely accurate, it was actually coming out of a bit of a lull.

The History: From the 2014 Boom to the 2019 Lull

To understand where we are, we have to look back. In 2014, podcasting truly took off. That was the year Apple Podcasts became a native, pre-installed app on iOS 8. It also happened to be the year Serial launched. Serial became a global phenomenon and turned "podcasting" into a household name. Suddenly, Sarah Koenig was on The Tonight Show, the industry gained massive visibility, and a crap ton of people started listening and launching their own shows.

It was an incredible influx. It was also a time when veteran podcasters—people who had been there from the very beginning—figured out how to build real businesses, networks, and communities around their shows. They began to design sustainable business models.

On a personal note, 2014 was also the year we founded the She Podcasts community. What started as a tiny Facebook Group had grown to around 15,000 members by 2019.

Between 2014 and 2019, we saw a slow, steady rise. But by 2019, that growth started to normalize and plateau. The industry began asking, “What are we doing next?” While demand was high, the underlying infrastructure wasn't ready to monetize podcasts at scale. The ad technology wasn't advanced enough, and new podcasters struggled to grow in a way that actually made them money.

If you continued to invest in your show and build your business in 2019, you were in a solid position, but you weren't necessarily seeing massive growth. In fact, some of the folks who had started back in the 2014 wave were starting to become disillusioned with the grind and were beginning to step out of the scene.

There was hope, though. The industry truly believed in the power of its communities, and She Podcasts directly benefited from that momentum. 2019 was the year we hosted She Podcasts Live in Atlanta. In its very first year, it became the third-largest podcasting conference in the U.S.—and it was a space that explicitly centered women, with only women taking the stage. We felt a profound sense of optimism, camaraderie, and possibility. It felt like the podcasting community and the podcasting industry were moving forward, hand in hand.

The 2020 Pandemic Disruption

Then 2020 and COVID arrived, shaking absolutely everything to its core.

The pandemic forced the industry to move at hyper-speed. It broke our traditional ways of communicating and doing business. Because our lives were so completely upended, we had to adapt. SaaS products, hardware, services, and production tools all rushed to meet the moment. Some platforms and podcasters were ready for it; many were not.

A massive wave of new creators entered the space because they had nothing else to do. They went all-in on content, getting their hands dirty with both audio and video. (And let's be clear: video has always been a part of podcasting. It was always there, it just wasn't the dominant narrative or marketing focus that it is now).

A huge influx of capital followed the hype. Hosting companies saw a massive surge in sign-ups, while podcast coaches and communities grew rapidly. With so many new episodes being published, the ad inventory expanded. We saw breakout shows like Call Her Daddy—which had already built up massive, explosive momentum pre-pandemic in 2018 and 2019—leverage that grassroots power into a staggering, multimillion-dollar exclusive deal in 2021. This milestone, combined with the monumental exclusive deal that Joe Rogan secured in 2020, catapulted the Podcasting Industry into a whole new place.

During all of this, I remember thinking: there is no way this can be sustained. Human nature doesn’t allow for this volume of people to maintain something that is inherently very challenging. Podcasting requires immense passion, but it also demands a high level of competency across a dozen different skills. You have to be a good speaker, be incredibly consistent, understand technology, design artwork, edit audio and video, manage bandwidth, and coordinate guests.

Up to that point, podcasting was primarily a "solo" endeavor. Sure, some shows had teams, but for the most part, it was just co-hosts or supportive community members keeping things afloat. This new generation of creators quickly recognized that podcasting is hard—and they needed help!

Because of these pain points, an entire infrastructure blossomed. We saw the rise of guest-management services, podcast project managers, VAs, and specialized editors. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie. While the biggest players got the majority of the market, many of us were able to make a decent living or build a highly motivating side hustle.

2022–2025: The Deconstruction and the Rise of AI

This bubble peaked around mid-2022. By 2023, the tide had clearly turned.

I wouldn't call what happened in 2024 and 2025 "destruction," but rather a deconstruction. Everything was pulled apart. The business models that had cropped up since 2020 began to fracture.

During this time, the Industry showed its ass.

It pulled way back on supporting the actual community with money. All that corporate sponsorship and investment in smaller niche groups, grassroots conferences, communities, and local events just completely dried up. There was no immediate, clear ROI for the big players, so they re-prioritized where their dollars were going. At the end of the day, a business has to business—they needed to profit or die. But when they made that shift to protect their bottom line, what suffered the most was "the people" of podcasting.

At the same time, the massive, disruptive explosion of generative AI from late 2022 and throughout 2023 escalated production speeds and disrupted our workflows, feeding a constant demand for more productivity and more content.

But the underlying business models didn't actually evolve. Solo creators started running out of capacity and failing to make ends meet. Today, many people are scraping pennies and trying to save on expenses.

And that brings us to the current moment: the video influx.

The Illusion of the Video "White Knight"

Right now, video is being treated as the "white knight" riding in to save the podcast industry. I’m not saying podcasting is failing—far from it. I’m saying the industry is misinterpreting what podcasting actually is.

The heart of podcasting has always been built on the human voice, intimate connection, and our capacity to speak directly to our people. It is a slow, steady, earthy medium. That reality goes directly against the capitalistic, year-over-year exponential growth mindset of modern business.

Most podcasts will build an audience, reach a natural plateau, and basically stay at that level for the lifetime of the show—fluctuating just slightly up and down. But creators get trapped in a loop of trying to force exponential growth. If you build a business model expecting your downloads to grow from 100 to 200 to 300 year-over-year just so you can make ad money, it’s going to bite you in the butt.

Instead, ask yourself: What can I build with these 100 intimate, dedicated listeners? Set your expectations around the small and the sustainable. If the show eventually scales up, great—you can adjust. But build your business on the intimacy you have right now, knowing that audience churn is normal. People’s lives and interests change, and they move on. It has nothing to do with the quality of your show.

The current rush of capital into video podcasting is not sustainable. This is simply the peak of the hype. The Industry—with a capital "I"—isn’t chasing video because it deepens the connection with listeners; they are chasing it because they are banking on massive corporate advertising dollars.

The industry is shouting "podcasting is video now!" because the parties holding the megaphone have invested heavily in video, so it behooves them for it to succeed. Everyone else is chasing the hype without looking at the long-term reality of sustaining it.

We are stuck in a reductive, black-and-white debate: Is it audio, or is it video? In reality, audiences will simply follow content they like, and creators will make whatever content they can sustain and find fun. Period.

The Corporate Game vs. The Rest of Us

We see massive, eye-popping content plays like Jay Shetty’s $100 million deal with Netflix and Spotify. That is fantastic for Jay, and it’s a great licensing agreement for those platforms—but that game is being played completely outside of actual "podcasting."

That is a licensing and distribution deal built for streaming platforms, regardless of the medium.

It just so happens that the names signing these contracts have video shows that are also delivered to podcast feeds.

This corporate game won’t affect the "little people"—the rest of the podcasters out there. While networks, studios, and corporations shell out multimillion-dollar sums for a tiny handful of elite, celebrity content creators, it has absolutely no impact on the everyday human creating a podcast.

Let me say that again, it has absolutely no impact on the everyday human creating a podcast.

The 5-Year Outlook: The Blueprint for Success

And now, back to my prediction.

Within five years, that specialized "video pipeline" as we know it—the agencies, short-form editing services, and platforms built entirely on the hype of video podcasts—will be gone. It will still exist as a standard tool for content production, but the gold-rush growth will have vanished.

Studios, networks, and large podcasts that are heavily investing in massive, over-engineered video production houses will suffer in the exact same way that over-leveraged businesses and initiatives disappeared from ~2023 onward. The financial return on those massive video investments simply isn't going to pan out because they are chasing an advertiser's dream of scale, completely missing the reality of what it actually takes to build and maintain sustainable content.

And let's be honest about the talent: great hosts are incredibly hard to find. Finding people who are vibrant, multi-faceted, and genuinely passionate is rare. Podcasting is an immense amount of work, and even major celebrities try their hand at it only to quickly realize they can't do it. They quit because maybe they can't speak on their feet, they lack the natural charisma and maybe knowledge to carry a spontaneous conversation, or—even with a million-dollar studio and a team behind them—they simply don't have the passion to show up week after week and build an audience slowly... and I mean slowly. At the end of the day, people are still just looking to connect with the real, the authentic, and the community.

That brings us back to the second layer of the prediction: when that corporate video dream fails to pan out, the conversation around audio versus video will simply cease to exist.

The creators who thrive won’t be the ones carrying an exhausting checklist of things they have to do. It’s not about feeling forced to run a newsletter, post daily video clips, design perfect graphics, and master every social channel just to survive in this space. Instead, the magic lies in an inherent quality of all successful, long-term creators: a willingness to get scrappy, stay intensely curious, and simply experiment. We expand to meet the times. How are people finding you? How are they engaging in conversations with you? That is the core of the product.

I can 100% stand by this: social platforms and how you reach people will CHANGE...A LOT.

People who love podcasts for their intimacy and clarity, and who use RSS as their delivery mechanism, will continue to thrive.

I know. I'm showing my ass now.

First and foremost, focus on the platform that you love—the one that brings you intense, unfiltered, absolute joy. Start right there. And then, if you want to monetize, don't pigeonhole your strategy around a specific platform or media style. Know your preference, but give yourself the permission and room to expand into more. Lay your foundation on keystone business practices:

1. Understand exactly where your money is coming from.
2. Know what specific product or service you are offering.
3. Build a diversified, self-owned ecosystem of income streams that you can scale up or down.

If you own your channels, the noise and drama of the broader industry won't affect you. The core functionality of an audio podcast isn't going to change. It will remain a deeply connected community, but it will never be a massive, infinitely scalable mass-market product.

So, if this is the space you want to be in, my advice to you is this: Dream big, but build small. Build sustainable. Build to not scale.