With both Nielsen and Edison Research having recently reported growing audiences for women’s sports content, it’s no surprise that more sports podcasts aimed at and hosted by women are changing the face, and gender, of sports audio.
“Female fans care about all different types of sports, and there’s a market to speak to them,” Ellen Hyslop, co-founder of sports media company The Gist, tells Marketing Brew. For Hyslop, who launched “The Gist of It” podcast in 2020, it’s a refreshing change from her first look into the podcast space when readers of The Gist’s newsletter were asking for an audio extension, when “the top 10, top 20, top 30 podcasts, every single one of them were hosted by men.”
Since its launch, Hyslop says, “The Gist of It,” which covers men’s and women’s sports, has seen its audience increase 20% year-over-year without any paid marketing support, although Aflac has signed on as a presenting partner, and the show is attracting interest from other advertisers. Driving the podcast’s popularity is the 90%-plus of its primarily millennial and Gen Z audience identifying as female or non-binary. “People aren’t immediately thinking of that 28-year-old corporate girlie in New York as someone who would be listening to a sports podcast on their way into the office one day, but that’s really who we’re talking to,” she says.
Overall, with more women in leadership positions, and women’s sports viewership — and advertiser interest — on the up-and-up, there’s a significantly greater presence of women’s sports podcasts. This past summer, iHeartMedia and agency Deep Blue Sports+Entertainment joined forces to create the Women’s Sports Audio Network platform, which includes the “Good Game with Sarah Spain” daily podcast and women’s sports reports across 500 iHeart radio stations.
As with The Gist, iHeart saw a boost in advertiser interest in women’s sports content. “In some categories, we had people fighting, down to who’s going to sign the papers and be in first,” iHeartMedia CMO Gayle Troberman says.
Over the past several years, The Athletic, Vox Media, Dear Media, Betches Media and others have started up women’s sports podcasts. “For years, whenever I’ve turned on pre-game or halftime reports, I have always been disappointed to see almost exclusively all-male roundtables and chat shows on my screens,” Betches Media Chief Content Officer Kate Ward says. “It’s the reason we are psyched to be amplifying women’s voices in the space even further.”
According to VP of Advertising Lauren Funke, numbers for The Athletic’s women’s sports podcasts have spiked in the past year, with “The Athletic Women’s Basketball Show’s” monthly downloads up 97% since March, as women listeners now make up 66% of the show’s audience vs. 49% in 2023. “We’re going to continue to invest, there’s no question,” Funke says. “It’s important for our business, because advertisers want to be around it. I do expect that we’re going to continue to see growth and momentum.”
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