The Sports Podcast Group launched the Sports Podcast Awards last July, with an emphasis on discoverability and community, says Managing Director, Dylan Pugh.
Speaking to PodcastingToday, former Spotify exec, Dylan says the idea of the awards came having seen an explosion of new podcasts during lockdown and how competitive it is for anyone new to it, to get noticed. “Discoverability is a massive challenge,” he says, “When you’ve spent so long creating your own podcast, you set it live and it goes into a blackhole on Apple and Spotify and nobody knows it exists. It’s hard to get it noticed.”
Dylan saw the challenges for discoverability from a podcaster’s perspective as well as a listeners’ perspective. As a podcast listener himself, he says you tend to listen to the same ones over and over, so only get exposed to the tip of the iceberg.
This got him thinking about what he could do a little bit differently, which led to partnering with the Sports Industry Group, the company behind the Sport Industry Awards. Their discussions resulted in the creation of the Sports Podcast Awards.
“The challenge at the beginning was that we were a new brand,” says Dylan, “We had to raise awareness, mainly across the US and the UK, but it’s a global initiative and we’ve had entries from 13 countries around the world.”
It’s gone better than expected, with over 320 entries and 61% of them are from independent creators. There have also been entries from big names including the BBC, Sky Sports The Athletic, NBC, CBS, The Ringer and ESPN.
“We had a lot of the big global publishers but still the majority of our community are the independent creators who really just want to get their podcast noticed,” says Dylan.
The judging process has been designed to be as fair as possible. The first stage involves an industry jury from the podcasting world who listened to all entries in each category. They had to decide on a diverse shortlist of eight in each category.
The list of eight in each of the 24 categories was then uploaded to their website for the public to vote. To make it fair, it was decided that podcaster votes would give more points than listener votes. This is to prevent podcasts with a large audience having an advantage over those with smaller audiences, by encouraging those listeners to vote for them. Listener votes count as 20% of the total.
Having sport specific awards rather than being a category in generic awards is important according to Dylan. He says there are natural sub-categories such as football, tennis rugby etc., plus things such as sports news and sports documentaries, but it isn’t as clear-cut in other genres.
It’s probably no surprise that bigger sports like football (soccer) and American football had more entries into the awards, but interestingly the higher number of votes are in the combat sports categories. Voters can share the categories they’ve voted in – the most shared is the Equality and Social Impact. More data like this will be released soon.
There has been a change in sports podcasting over the last 18 months with its rapid growth. “It’s a good thing but it can be an intimidating thing for a new person coming into the market,” says Dylan, “There’s also been a new trend of sports people getting involved. Traditionally it was an ex-sportsperson who was a bit of a pundit, but now there are more active players or athletes getting involved and those are the ones that are becoming really popular.”
Dylan sees a trend of growth for sports podcasting, he thinks a lot of rights holders will take it more seriously, especially in the UK. Another trend, he believes, will to be a bit more immediate and short term – at the moment you have to wait until about Tuesday to get most of the podcasts related to the weekend matches. He thinks it will become more instant with short form bursts and releasing content sooner after matches have happened.
With the winners in the Sports Podcast Awards due to be announced on 31 March, there have been over 15,000 registrations on the website with over 9,000 votes. Although it means not everyone who registered has voted, but Dylan believes many will have done so to listen to the entries.
This is seen as a positive because entries had to be up to 10 minutes in duration, not just an episode, but an overall demonstration of the podcast. This means people can go to the website and listen to the compilations and decide if they want to subscribe to a particular podcast.
There’s a live leader board on the website, with voting open until 6 March, it changes every night so you can see who currently leads each category.
English former rugby union player, James Haskell and NFL Network broadcaster, Colleen Wolfe will be co-hosting the announcement of winners in a live broadcast on Youtube and social media channels on 31 March at 9pm UK time.
Dylan is pleased with the progress in the first year of the awards, he says: “We’ve exceeded our expectations in terms of newsletter sign ups, people engaging with us and we’re building a community – that’s the key thing for us. Before we get any brands or partners involved, we need to build a community of sports podcasters from around the world, and we’re doing that now.
“The other thing that’s important to us is building discoverability for everyone in the sports podcast world – whether you’re a listener and not quite sure what to listen to, or if you want to listen to, say a new tennis podcast, then we are hoping to be that go to source to discover new podcasts.
“For independent creators, we can be a very useful resource for you, to get your podcast noticed and raise more awareness for it, either by being a judge or getting on to the shortlist.
“They are the key things for us – discoverability and community.”
You can find out more about the Sports Podcast Awards website.
