Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan explores the business of podcasting for B2 English students. Using a short video, the class material teaches key vocabulary and grammar, making it an engaging ESL lesson on modern media. The lesson plan helps students discuss the rise of podcasts, including a warm-up discussion, vocabulary matching, and comprehension questions. Students then practice the passive voice to describe business actions and conclude with a creative role-play where they pitch their own podcast idea to investors, designed to improve both listening and speaking skills in a business and media context.
Activities
- Students begin by discussing their personal podcast listening habits, then match key business and media vocabulary like lucrative, acquisition, and confluence to their definitions to prepare for the video.
- Learners watch a video about the history and business of podcasting, answering detailed comprehension questions and completing a true/false exercise to check their understanding of how podcasts became a media phenomenon.
- The lesson focuses on using the passive voice to discuss business processes. After a grammar exercise, students learn useful phrases for discussing trends and apply everything in a final role-play activity pitching a new podcast.
This is Shaq podcast. In our new podcast. And we have a new podcast. Our very first podcast.
Influencers, celebrities, journalists, random friends of yours, everyone has a podcast.
Spotify plans to spend $500 million on podcast related acquisitions this year alone.
But why is this happening now? Podcasts have been around for over a decade.
To understand what changed to make podcasts the phenomenon they are now, we have to, hold on.
This is better. Okay, we have to look at the big picture.
So yeah, podcasts came about because of Apple, iTunes and iPods.
Now we recently announced something new for iTunes and iPod and it's called podcasting.
Apple brought podcast to iTunes in 2005.
Podcasting of course is a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting.
Steve Jobs called podcasts, TiVo for radio, which is an insanely dated reference, but can help us contextualize this whole shift.
Before podcasting you had the radio, with its ads, unpredictable content, and your favorite hosts timed to specific days with specific shows, but with podcasts.
You can download radio shows and listen to 'em on your computer or put 'em on your iPod anytime you want.
And you can subscribe to these shows too, so you never miss an episode.
Plus podcasts are free just like the radio.
With the release of internet connected smartphones, people could download podcasts onto their phones directly instead of having to load the audio onto their phone from their computer.
And that made listening to shows even easier.
Still in 2009 only 11% of the US population had listened to a podcast in the last month.
But then a podcast arrived in 2014 that changed everything.
From this American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week, I'm Sarah Koenig.
Serial broke with established podcast rules. It was a narrative, mystery, crime show that told a single story over many episodes versus just one.
And that new format drew listeners in. It became the fastest podcast to ever reach five million downloads and streams on iTunes.
Around the same time that Serial and other highly produced shows became popular, cars were becoming more connected too, which gave commuters an opportunity and place to listen.
Plus new direct to consumer companies had money to spend on podcast ads.
The confluence of all of these factors pushed the podcast business to new heights.
This week's show is brought to you by Casper. This episode is sponsored by Dell. Turn your great idea into a reality with Squarespace.
Last year podcasts created nearly half a billion dollars in revenue.
Maybe you've heard hosts read ad and give you a promo code. That's a main way shows make money.
And that code helps advertisers know which show has sold their product.
Shows make money in other ways too. Some adapt their story for TV and others host live events.
Other than the recording costs, audio is relatively cheap to capture, particularly compared to video.
So it can be a lucrative business. Media companies and individual creators can try out podcasts without risking a ton of cash.
And they can publish their shows in the same places that major publishers do.
Now that there's so much money in podcasts companies want more control and visibility into how well their ads actually work.
So podcast technology is becoming more sophisticated and the field is changing.
Promo codes might not be needed anymore. Advertisers want a more robust way to track ads, similarly to how they do with banners online.
That's why the Interactive Advertising Bureau established its podcast measure technical guidelines in December 2017.
With this new standard, advertisers now know what counts as a download, or a play, and they can get a real sense of how many people heard their ad.
The ads themselves are becoming smarter and dynamic too. Which means one ad doesn't have to live inside the same episode forever.
They can be swapped out with other ads as time goes on and podcasters can improve their ad offerings by guaranteeing timeliness.
Everything is formalizing in an effort to make the field even more lucrative.
Some podcast players are experimenting with exclusive content too, which is a fundamental change to the open world podcasts have traditionally lived in.
Podcasts are starting to be tracked more like the rest of the web and the content is starting to be distributed more like movies or TV shows.
So why does everyone have a podcast now? Because they're cheap to make, the stakes are low, and the opportunity to make some cash could be big.
Plus who doesn't love the sound of their own voice.
So now that you've just watched this video on podcasts, wouldn't you know it, I have a podcast too and you should check it out.
It's called Why'd You Push that Button. We'll put a link below and you should click it.
See what it's all about, check it out. All right, we'll see you later, bye.
Vocabulary focus
The vocabulary section focuses on terms essential for discussing business and media trends. Students will learn and practice words like "acquisition" (a business purchase), "lucrative" (profitable), "confluence" (a coming together of factors), "narrative" (a story), and "sophisticated" (advanced), enabling them to analyze the podcast industry more precisely.
Grammar focus
This lesson concentrates on the passive voice, a structure commonly used in business and formal contexts. Students learn why the passive is used to emphasize an action over the agent (the person doing it) and practice transforming active sentences into passive ones. This helps them describe processes and industry changes, such as 'new guidelines were established,' in a more professional and appropriate way.
