What Kyndred Makes
Part 5: Podcasts
I’ve produced a narrative podcast.
My wife wrote a serialized audio drama called The Strange Chronicles, and I produced and directed it. I ran the edit, the mix, the sound design, the music...you name it. We also brought in an occasional guest director to expand the creative influence and help approach the material from a different angle. The whole process felt like making a film with your eyes closed, and I mean that as a compliment. Every creative decision had to land through sound alone and rely solely on your ears. No establishing shot to orient the audience. No close-up to sell the emotion. Just voices, atmosphere and the listener’s imagination doing the rest.
It was one of the most creatively satisfying things I’ve worked on and it taught me something about the medium that I don’t think you can fully understand until you’ve sat in a room trying to figure out how to make a listener feel the tension when you only have access to a single sense.
A narrative podcast is not a talk show with writing. It’s authored, produced, performed work. It requires scripts, actors, engineers, composers, sound designers and editors. The production pipeline looks a lot more like a film than it does like two people sitting across from each other with microphones. And when the work is good, it reaches people in a way that other formats can’t touch, because the delivery mechanism is so intimate. It’s one voice, or a handful of voices, arriving directly inside your head. Just the story and the listener.
That intimacy is part of why the format is growing so fast.
Roughly 600 million people worldwide listen to podcasts today. The overall audience has grown nearly 30% in five years and shows no sign of flattening. In the US alone, 58% of Americans aged 12 and up are now monthly podcast listeners, up from single digits in 2008. But the number that matters more for narrative work specifically is this: some industry benchmarks cite narrative podcasts as carrying completion rates as high as 85%. That means listeners who start a serialized audio story overwhelmingly finish it. They don’t listen and ghost. They commit. That kind of engagement is rare across any medium, and it signals something important about the relationship between a narrative podcast and its audience.
The audio drama audience continues to grow at a steady compound rate year over year, and institutional recognition is catching up. The Tribeca Film Festival just announced its largest and most ambitious podcast lineup to date, including scripted fiction premieres alongside its film and television selections. The same festival that was first to establish an official podcast selection back in 2021 now treats narrative audio as a co-equal format for world premieres. The format is here to stay.
Stories that started in your ears and ended up on your screen
Some of the best examples of the podcast medium’s power have come from stories that proved their audience in audio first and then expanded outward.
Welcome to Night Vale launched as a twice-monthly podcast in 2012 with two people and a microphone. Today it has tens of thousands of Apple reviews, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, spawned multiple novels, national and international live tours, and built an entire production company (Night Vale Presents) that incubates other narrative podcasts. No studio greenlit any of that. The fan base was the greenlight.
Limetown debuted in July 2015 and hit #1 on iTunes within two months. That audience proof led to a television adaptation and a novel. Podcast to TV to book. The flywheel in action.
Homecoming, the psychological thriller from Gimlet featuring Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac, proved its audience so convincingly that Amazon adapted it with Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail directing. The audio audience de-risked the entire adaptation for the buyer.
The Magnus Archives ran five seasons and 200 episodes of horror fiction starting in 2016, built one of the most passionate fan communities in audio, and has since expanded into a sidequel series (The Magnus Protocol, currently in its second season and funded by Kickstarter), a tabletop RPG, a board game, and a subscriber community. All from a podcast that started as one guy reading horror statements into a microphone.
And then there’s The Edge of Sleep. It launched as a hit QCODE podcast in 2019, became one the biggest genre narrative podcasts of its era, and starred Markiplier (yes, the same person who surprised traditional Hollywood with The Iron Lung this year). When they tried to sell the television adaptation, major media outlets passed. The show eventually landed on Prime Video through their self-upload service with zero marketing support from Amazon, and it still surged to the platform’s top ten within days, carried entirely by the built-in audience. The fans dragged it into existence because the traditional system couldn’t figure out how to value what was already proven.
Every one of those stories follows the same pattern. A creator makes something with minimal capital. The audience shows up. And the proven demand unlocks the next format, whether that’s a TV deal, a novel, a game, a live tour or a merchandise line. The podcast wasn’t the stepping stone. The podcast was the proof.
Stories that started on screens and followed fans home
But the flywheel spins both directions, and this is the part of the conversation that most of the industry is still sleeping on.
If you’re a fan of a Kyndred series and you watched the finale on a Friday night, what happens Saturday morning? You want more of that world. You want to stay inside it. A companion narrative podcast, set in the same universe, extending the story or exploring a corner of it the screen version didn’t have time for, lets you do exactly that. And it meets you where screens can’t.
About 40% of podcast listeners tune in during their commute. Almost another 50% listen while doing things around the house. There’s even an 8-to-10 PM listening surge where listeners are connecting with audio as a way to settle into the end of their day. Listeners spend an average of seven hours a week with podcasts, and much of that listening happens on mobile devices. Stories in their pockets.
Think about what that means for a story world. A fan watches the show at home. The next morning they pick up the companion podcast over coffee. Monday, they’re 20 minutes into the next episode on the train. Tuesday night, they’re in bed with headphones, settling into the story the way people used to fall asleep to a novel. The story doesn’t stop when the screen goes dark. It follows them through the parts of their lives where screens don’t belong.
That continuous engagement changes the math on everything else. A fan who lives inside a story across three formats is more invested than someone who watches a season and moves on. They’re more likely to back the next project. More likely to buy the physical edition. More likely to show up at the live event. The podcast is the connective tissue between all of it.
Gretta Cohn, the CEO of Pushkin Industries, recently made the point directly: many podcast companies were built on the promise of IP development to TV and film, but if you’re not considering books and audiobooks as part of the pipeline, you’re missing out.
Kyndred isn’t missing out. The cross-medium model we’ve been describing throughout this series, where a single story world can launch in the strongest first format and then expand deliberately across books, podcasts, film, television, music and eventually games, requires narrative podcasts as a core piece of the architecture. They’re the format that proves audience at the lowest production risk. They’re the format that keeps fans engaged between seasons and between releases. And they’re the format that meets people in the car, on the subway, on the walk, in bed at the end of the day, when what they want more than anything is to close their eyes and let a good story find them.
That’s what we’re making room for at Kyndred. Not podcasts as marketing. Not podcasts as a development pipeline for the “real” medium. Podcasts as a medium that stands on its own, connects to everything else and lives in the spaces between all of it.
Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.
Your Turn
What's the narrative podcast that got you hooked? The one you stayed up too late listening to, or the one that made your commute disappear? What's the story you wish someone would turn into a podcast? And what's the show, film or book you love that would make an incredible audio drama?
Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.
Thanks for reading.
-Lauer