How should we podcast? Valence moderates the impact of discourse concentration on podcast episode engagement

While podcast listeners are increasing year after year, companies are heavily investing in podcast and influencer advertising, and practitioners’ reports present outstanding figures on human voice-based media, marketing and consumer behavior studies have devoted limited attention to study the determinants of podcast success. Through the analysis of behavioral data related to 401 episodes of one of the most popular U.S. news podcasts, “The Daily” by the New York Times, we investigated the roles of two important podcast factors in determining consumer engagement. Specifically, we tested the effect of discourse concentration – the balance vs. imbalance of speakers’ contributions within a conversation – on episode engagement, conditional to the (positive vs. negative) valence of the content presented within the episode. We contribute to the literature on auditory stimuli proposing and testing a conceptual model of podcast success, and providing relevant managerial implications to content creators.