With the calendar turning over to 2025, Barrett Media is sitting down with some of the best and brightest media researchers in the industry for a weeklong series, “Digging Through Data.” In the final installment of the series, we spoke with Amplifi Media founder and CEO Steven Goldstein.
When asked what data trends stood out to him in 2024, Steven Goldstein had a very succinct answer.
“Legacy media is in trouble,” he said. “It’s aging.”
He’s right about the aging audiences of traditional media. The average age of a cable news viewer is 70. Median age of a primetime TV viewer? 65. Talk radio sees its average age at 58, but that includes sports radio which — on average — features an audience 10 years younger, driving down the average age.
However, the average podcast listener is 36-years-old. Which is why that medium was so imperative to the 2024 election.
“It was difficult to reach a lot of the younger demos with legacy media. So to me, that is one of the truly big stories of this last year, and will clearly continue going forward as these things either age out or redevelop,” he added.
Just because legacy media is in “trouble” in Goldstein’s mind doesn’t mean the future is non-existent. There are pathways to sustained success and audience sizes.
“Use Saturday Night Live as an example. Who watches SNL live on Saturday night at 1130 any longer? About 4 million people, but millions and millions more are watching the clips on YouTube,” Goldstein began. “So they have come to the realization that they need to be a bit more platform agnostic. They are. They’re paid by YouTube and they make money off of that. I saw an interview with Seth Meyers in which he was asked ‘Does it bother you that people don’t watch the whole show?’ He said, ‘No, what would bother me as if nobody watched any of the show. So I’ll take it on YouTube, thank you very much.'”
Steven Goldstein said he’s shared with radio stations that a time-shifted strategy — similar to that utilized by linear television brands on YouTube, Rumble, and TikTok — could be a way to continue to remain competitive in the changing media landscape. Many in the radio industry, however, have been slow to adopt or even consider the concept, Goldstein shared.
Nielsen is changing the amount of qualifying time needed to earn a quarter-hour for its ratings service. The time will drop to three minutes of listening, down from the previous marker of five minutes. And the Amplifi Media founder — who was previously the chairman of the Arbitron Advisory Council on two separate occasions — says he has opinions on the subject that “might be controversial.”
“If you do the math on that, you could theoretically have 300 minutes of listening credit. If somebody listened for three minutes and then they went on to the next three and the next three, you can have 20 incidents of listening within the hour,” said Goldstein. “That’s 300 minutes, five hours of listening. That feels pretty inflated, even in this day and age. It’s looney tunes.”
In 2025, Steven Goldstein said Amplifi Media wants to learn more about the future of podcasting, even if that means defining what a podcast is these days.
“The ascension of video in podcasting is essential. We are in an interesting and unique phase of what’s a podcast, and I don’t think we know exactly where that’s going, but we are in the middle of it,” he said. “There will be some creators who do extraordinarily well transitioning to video, and anecdotally, there are many who are having a difficult time.
“So that raises the question of, ‘Does everything need to be a video?’ I think we’re learning that in real-time. I don’t know that anybody has a definitive answer, but that is where we are at the moment,” Goldstein concluded.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
