What makes a podcast influential?

Last week I noticed a press release, sent out via PressGazette (a British media news website). The article announced that Acast, the Scandi podcast hosting and advertising company, would be leading a consortium of “probably the most influential” publishers in podcasting. Those publishers? The Guardian, The Times, The Economist, The FT, and Tortoise. This immediately struck me as a little bit off, simply because I couldn’t really think of a metric by which these were the most influential publishers in podcasting. And so I tweeted to that extent.I also noted, somewhat cheekily, each of these publisher’s current best chart placement in the the All Categories section of the Apple podcast charts. They were as follows: The Guardian (№29), The Times (№57), FT (№70), Economist (№130), and Tortoise (№52). And so, by simple popularity, it didn’t strike me that any of them had a particularly good claim to influence.

To get meta for a second, I am by no means an influencer in the podcast space. But my tweet was taken up by a couple of genuine clout-wielders in the sector, who wanted to ask the same question. Firstly, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former comms man and host of The Rest is Politics, and then Gary Lineker, England footballer turned pod-magnate. They were both, rightly, drawing attention to the fact that Goalhanger Podcasts (the company founded by Lineker with some excellent producers ex of the BBC) had three podcasts (The Rest is History, Leading, and The Rest is Politics) in the Top 10 that I posted. Surely that means that they, not Acast’s consortium of legacy publishers, are Britain’s most influential podcast publishing company? I tweeted this last week, rather glibly, but now I want to address what I think is a very serious, important question in podcasting. What makes a podcast influential?

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