Your podcast audience may not be what you thought it was

This episode will challenge a lot of assumptions you may have about your audience. If you’ve been losing sleep over whether you need to shift all your energy into video, or feel the pressure to keep up with multi-camera setups just to stay relevant, you’re going to want to pay attention to this one.

We’re sharing new research from Tom Webster and the Sounds Profitable team that uncovers who your most valuable listeners really are — and it’s not who you think.

Link to report: https://soundsprofitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Audio-Primes-2026-Webinar-Version.pdf

If you've been seeing all the recent propaganda that the future

of podcasting is all in the video, and you've been

sort of panicking about Whether you need a four camera setup, a ring light,

and a face for, well, YouTube, I've got some

news that might let you sleep a little bit easier tonight. The most

valuable listening you have doesn't care what you look like, they care what

you sound like. They care what you have to say. And they're

significantly more likely to buy what you recommend and tell their

mates about your show and still be listening two years from

now.

Welcome to Podcasting Insights. I'm Neil Valio,

and we're going to talk about audio Primes. All right, first up,

some context. Tom Webster and the team at Sounds

Profitable have just recently published a piece of research

that that should frankly be required reading for

anyone making, commissioning, or advertising

on any podcast. It's about a segment they've named the

Audio Primes. One of the questions that we ask in the podcast

landscape is thinking about all the podcasts that you consume.

What percentage of them do you watch versus what percent you listen

to? And 22% of podcast

consumers say that they listen to three quarters

or more of their podcast. That's roughly one in

five. And on almost every metric that actually

matters to a business, they outperform the average

demographically. And this is going to be the bit that's going to really piss a

lot of people on LinkedIn off. They're younger, they're not older,

they over index in the 18 to 34 bracket. They

over index in the 35 to 54 bracket. They

under index at 55 plus. They've got more education,

they're earning more cash. 9% of them have a household

income of over 200 grand,

versus 6% of the average podcast consumer.

And this one is kind of interesting. They're more

likely to have kids at home, which, if you think about that for more than

a few seconds, makes perfect sense. Parents

need their hands and eyes free, and audio

is the only medium that delivers that. Now, here's where the

research gets quite interesting, because it's counterintuitive.

You'd assume that audioprimes listen because they don't like

video, but that's wrong. They consume more video

than average. They're significantly higher on YouTube,

they're higher on Instagram Reels, and they're higher on

TikTok. So they're not rejecting video. They're making an

active, deliberate choice when they consume a

podcast. You know, that specific deliberate act

of consuming the content. They want it in their ears.

And that distinction matters enormously because it means audio isn't the

default for them, it's the preference. And preference

is a much more powerful thing than than a default. Let's talk

loyalty, because this is kind of where it gets fun.

77% of audio primes listen to podcasts daily

or weekly, 18 points higher than the average.

72% use the same platform every time. Once

they're on your platform, they're not hopping away. They follow

fewer shows. In fact, 48% follow just one or two.

But when it comes to those one or two shows, they're ride or die.

It's all habit. It's part of their weekly rhythm. And my favorite

stat from the whole report, which you can find linked

from the episode description 22% of audio

primes say they have never stopped listening to a podcast

ever in their lives. Once they find the one they like,

they just keep going with it. It's appointment to

download, which should make every podcaster listening to

my voice right now stop and breathe for just a second.

You are building something that has the potential to become

sticky if you do it right. And of course everyone

wants to know about ads, because if you are monetizing,

this is the bit you're going to need to know. Audio Primes don't really care

about ad volume. They under index on too many

ads as a reason to quit out of a podcast. What they do care

about is relevance. They over index on

the ads weren't relevant as a reason to quit a show.

So translated into simple terms,

audio Primes will happily listen to ads.

They just want them to make sense to them and

for the show, for the topic. Dumping a

generic programmatic spot into a niche show is going to

hurt this audience, whereas a thoughtful

contextual host thread endorsement will probably land with them.

So there's a lesson in there for anyone building a monetization strategy

based on dynamic ad insertion alone. It's

probably not going to work, particularly if you're farming that out

to the likes of Libsyn ads or

Acast ads. Now, the Sounds Profitable team brought

in a real neuroscientist on all this, Alberto, who

broke down what's actually happening in the brain when you're listening to a voice

that you've heard before. And it comes down to three key things, all right? Number

one, oxytocin, also known as the bonding

hormone. It's what mothers produce when they're breastfeeding, and it's

what you produce when you hear the voice of A podcast host that you listen

to regularly. Number two, mirror neurons.

These are firing up when you empathize with another human. When your favorite

host sounds sad, your brain goes a bit sad. When they laugh,

you smile. You are literally

neurologically mirroring them. And point three,

mere exposure. Now, this is the compounding effect that we talk about

when it comes to showing up regularly. Consistency.

Week after week, month after month, that familiarity

accrues into trust. And trust in this space is

the single scarcest resource on earth. So if

you put all three of those together, you get what psychologists call

a parasocial relationship. A one way bond where

the listener genuinely feels like the host is their friend. And

did you know audio creates a stronger parasocial

bond than video does? Because video gives your brain too many

things to focus on. You're looking at things, whereas

audio strips it to voice and words. You're not

watching someone, you're sitting with them. Or as

Alberto in this webinar put it, a screen makes you a spectator.

A voice makes you a friend. Which, frankly, I might get

printed on a T shirt. We gotta address the elephant in the room here,

AI because this came up in the research and it's relevant to the point as

well. Audio primes really, really, really don't want AI generated

voices. In fact, about half say they'd be less likely to keep

listening if they found out their favorite show was AI

voiced. Only 15% said they'd be more likely to keep listening.

Video primes, which is those people who mostly watch, are

far more open to synthetic voices, probably because

they're being subjected to them all the time. With AI

generated slop on TikTok and Reels, they've become

desensitized to it. For those of us in the audio first world,

that is a useful line drawn in the sand. Your audience

came to you for a human, so don't feed them a machine.

Okay, so what to actually do with this information? And let me turn all of

this into something you can actually Action. If audio primes

are your most valuable audience and the data is pretty

unambiguous that they are, here's what the research

is telling you to do. Number one, be consistent. Whatever your

cadence. Weekly, fortnightly, monthly, be there. The mere

exposure effect only works if you actually expose.

So don't do what I did with this show and go silent for a month.

In fact, it was more than a month. Show up. Do the recordings

publish. Number two, be human. Your voice is literally your

superpower. So don't outsource that to any AI software.

Yeah, it's really impressive. What 11 labs can do. Use

it as a backup. Don't lean on it. Point 3 Be relevant with

your ads. Don't just take a paycheck. Ask whether the ad

fits with your audience and read it with some

thought behind it. Make sure there's alignment there. Point four

don't obsess about video. Sure have a YouTube presence.

That's fine. They are still saying it's the number one Discovery channel. Well,

whether we like that or not, there might be some truth to it. It has

a great search engine. But don't sacrifice the thing that

makes audio work in pursuit of video metrics that don't really translate to

loyalty anyway. Number 5 Nurture the word of

mouth. Audio primes tend to recommend shows to their friends

a 30 second if you enjoyed this, tell someone who'd like it.

That's worth way more than most paid marketing. Point six

Think about your listeners. Being parents, hands

free, eyes free isn't a nice to have for them, it's a necessity.

And it's a genuinely underserved market. Think about how your content

can reach people where they are and how they consume. Thanks

for listening. Send me your thoughts. You'll find me on LinkedIn. Or if you want

to go to Podmastery Co and get in

touch that way until the next episode. Good luck with your

continuing journey towards pod mastery.

Podcasting

insights.