I’ve officially started my PhD in Digital Culture and Media at the University of Pretoria. This is not me trying to sound clever, or disappearing into an academic cave for three years. I’m doing it because South African podcasting is growing fast, but the ground beneath it keeps shifting, like the sinkholes that have been opening up along the R21 between Pretoria and OR Tambo. From the outside things look fine. Up close, the people doing the work can feel the instability under their feet.
This article is the background to my research. It’s the “why”. It’s also me being upfront about what I’m trying to figure out, so that whatever I discover can actually help the South African podcasting industry in general, and the South African Podcasters Guild (SAPG) specifically.
The big issue starts with something deceptively simple. The word “podcast” is no longer stable.
In the early days, a podcast was easy to describe. It was audio. It was built in the shadow of radio. It lived in an open ecosystem where you published through RSS, people subscribed, and listeners could use whatever app they liked. That technical detail mattered because it wasn’t just a nerdy delivery method. It was a whole philosophy. Decentralised. Creator-led. No single gatekeeper.
Now try define a podcast in 2026 without getting into an argument within ten minutes.
Is a video show on YouTube a podcast? What if it’s an audio show with video added later? What if it’s never distributed through RSS and only exists inside Spotify? What if the “podcast” is actually ten clips on TikTok and an episode link nobody clicks? What if the main product is the transcript that ranks on Google?
All of that currently lives under the same label. And that’s not just a semantic problem. It points to real changes in infrastructure, governance, and value. In other words, it points to power.
Podcasting didn’t simply “evolve”. It collided with video, social platforms, recommendation systems, analytics dashboards, monetisation tools, and whatever new “creator economy” feature gets launched next week. What used to be an audio-first medium now operates inside a blended ecosystem where the audio is sometimes the core, sometimes the by-product, and sometimes just the excuse to farm attention elsewhere.
That matters because discovery is no longer neutral. Visibility is no longer evenly distributed. And earning money is no longer only about making good work and finding the right audience. It’s increasingly about how platforms organise attention, and how they translate that attention into monetisable value.
Which brings me to the next shift.
One of podcasting’s original superpowers was its openness. Anyone could publish. Anyone could listen. No single company got to decide what counted as legitimate, what surfaced, or what disappeared into the void.
That openness hasn’t vanished, but it has been reshaped by platformisation. The listening experience for most people now happens inside a handful of large platforms, and those platforms don’t merely host content. They govern it. They shape how people find shows, what gets recommended, what metrics matter, what “growth” looks like, and which monetisation options are even available.
So the question becomes uncomfortable, but unavoidable. If your visibility depends on a recommendation engine you don’t control, and your income depends on tools you can’t fully access, and the rules can change overnight, how independent are you really?
If you’re a big media organisation, you can treat platform changes as an operational nuisance. You adjust. You reallocate budget. You hire someone to “fix the strategy”. If you’re an independent creator, or a small studio, or a one-person show doing this after hours, platform shifts are not a nuisance. They are the difference between sustainability and burnout.
South Africa adds its own layers. Unequal access to data and devices affects listening patterns. Radio legacies shape expectations around format and professionalism. The advertising market is smaller, more cautious, and often still unsure how to buy into podcasting. Public funding and institutional support are patchy at best. And many podcasters aren’t trying to become the next global celebrity. They’re trying to build local audiences, serve communities, grow a business, or create work that actually means something.
This is why I’m not interested in importing neat answers from the US or Europe and pasting them onto our reality. South African podcasting needs South African evidence.
For this study, I’m using the South African Podcasters Guild (SAPG) as a strategically bounded site of inquiry. Not because the SAPG represents every podcaster in the country. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t claim to. The reason is simpler and more practical. The SAPG gives us a coherent way to study a fragmented and fast-changing environment, without pretending we can map every creator on every platform across the whole country.
It also gives access to an ecosystem, not just individuals. SAPG membership includes independent creators, studios and service providers, broadcasters, and even hosting platforms. That mix matters because podcasting is not one thing. It’s relationships. It’s supply chains. It’s dependencies. It’s a messy network of people trying to make work, distribute it, grow it, and somehow fund it.
This PhD isn’t motivated by academic curiosity alone. It’s motivated by the same conversations I keep hearing in South African podcasting circles, over and over, in different accents.
Creators are struggling to monetise without selling their souls. They’re struggling to reach audiences without becoming slaves to platforms. They’re trying to stay editorially free while still needing sponsorship or client work to pay the bills. They’re told to “grow” as if growth is a moral virtue, but growth doesn’t automatically translate into revenue. And they’re operating in a system where algorithms often favour scale, frequency, commercial predictability, and globally recognisable formats.
In plain terms, the structural question is about survival. Who gets seen, who gets paid, and under what conditions.
At the centre of the study is one core issue.
How do SAPG members in South Africa monetise podcasts, and how do they strategically use platform and hosting infrastructures to enable, scale, or constrain those monetisation practices?
Once you start pulling on that thread, a whole set of practical questions follows. What monetisation models are actually being used on the ground, from sponsorship and branded content through to memberships, crowdfunding, subscriptions, client-funded production, studio hire, and internal organisational budgets. How these models get combined in real life. How “success” is defined differently depending on whether you’re a part-time independent creator, a full-time professional, a studio, a broadcaster, or a hosting platform. How people use Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and social platforms to build audiences and convert attention into income, and what trade-offs they feel they’re making along the way. How platform features like analytics, dynamic ad insertion, or membership tools shape revenue potential, and how creators try to balance dependence on platforms with diversification that doesn’t kill momentum.
That is the terrain. It’s messy. It’s not going to be solved with a single “best practice” checklist.
I want this research to deliver two concrete contributions.
The first is a grounded map of the local production and distribution ecosystem from the creator’s point of view, including how podcasters relate to studios, hosting providers, editors, platforms, and other intermediaries. Not a glossy industry infographic. A real map, built from lived experience.
The second is a clear political economy account of how platform power is being negotiated locally, how creators adapt, where they resist, where they comply, and where they are simply forced to play the game because there is no other game available.
If I do this properly, it should give the SAPG stronger evidence for advocacy and strategic planning. It should help the broader industry speak more clearly about what’s actually happening underneath the growth narrative. It should also help creators stop blaming themselves for structural constraints that are bigger than any one person’s hustle.
Podcasting in South Africa is not broken. But it is constrained in ways we don’t yet describe well enough. My goal is to describe those constraints clearly, and then use that clarity to help us build smarter, fairer, more sustainable pathways forward.
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