Himalaya Podcast: Dare to be niche, yet able to serve the masses.

Author | Wu Ruoyu

Editor | Yuan Silai

You love literature but find it hard to find a whole block of time for reading. To maintain your reading habit, you click on the latest episode of the "Cultural Limited" podcast. The host's analysis and dissection of Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" and "The Boy Has Come" reaches your ears. When you hear the exciting parts, you choose to switch to the platform's audio books to experience the strange dreams described in the book until you close your eyes to end the day.

This is the daily routine of users using the Ximalaya APP.

Unlike traditional podcast programs, Ximalaya does not limit podcasts to the narrow range of conversation programs. Its content covers multiple fields such as sports, movies, current affairs, fitness, entertainment, finance, and more. Up to now, Ximalaya has more than 240,000 podcasts with commercial value, involving 16 tracks and 31 content categories. And by using the copyright resources of publications accumulated over the years, it establishes a connection between publications and audio interpretations of copyright content to help listeners form a cognitive closed loop.

Obviously, this idea has been quite effective. According to the "2024 Podcast Industry Report: Ear Time is Now" released by Ximalaya in conjunction with Ipsos and Ritan Park, 40% of users listen to podcasts for more than 1 hour a day.

Liu Zheng, the person in charge of the podcast business of Ximalaya, told Yingke that the age distribution of Ximalaya podcast users is concentrated on high-net-worth users aged 24 to 40. This group of people has three needs: cognitive improvement, acquisition of practical knowledge, and emotional comfort. If podcasts only stop at "cognitive improvement", it is impossible to truly solve users' cognitive anxiety.

Traditionally, we solve the problem of cognition through search engines to complete instantaneous knowledge input, but for the core users of podcasts, establishing a systematic and continuous content service ecosystem can truly meet users' needs for in-depth content and thereby increase the willingness to pay.

Therefore, the role of the platform is undoubtedly crucial if we want to amplify the commercial value of podcasts.

Podcast Breakthrough, Platform Connection is the Key

Ximalaya podcasts aim at the "top of the pyramid".

For a long time, many people have compared podcasts with short videos and graphic texts, discussing the volume, payment model, and streaming efficiency of the two, expecting podcasts to become another phenomenal product form after short videos.

However, the efficient distribution logic of audio and short videos relying on public domain traffic is the opposite. The former focuses on the private domain and requires more precise customers, that is, customers who have a certain degree of awareness of the brand. In the current situation where the advertising budget of enterprises continues to shrink, through the exposure of private domain traffic, it promotes the long-term brand mental influence and achieves the integration of brand and effect. Therefore, when discussing the commercialization stage of podcasts, we should return to the private domain business system.

"The special media form and consumption scenario of audio lead to a selection threshold. The ones who really want to improve cognition and acquire knowledge through audio content are a group of high-net-worth people," Liu Zheng said, "Objectively speaking, there is a great commercial gain in how to serve their needs and solve their cognitive anxiety."

The answer given by Ximalaya is to connect the free services and paid services of the platform.

The essence of business is that at least 3 - 4 parties benefit. Consumers are the source. When they are satisfied, creators have income, B - end advertisers are satisfied, and the platform achieves profitability. "In this process, users do not necessarily benefit from a single commercial product, but users can feel the corresponding value in both free services and paid services, and guide paid behavior through free works." Liu Zheng told Yingke. This means that Ximalaya needs to introduce, cultivate and identify better creators, use AI to help creators improve production efficiency and quality, and at the product level, shorten the path of consumer and creator identification and recommendation, and help advertisers improve the efficiency of user connection and reduce costs.

It is worth noting that Ximalaya has established a private domain membership system for hosts. In addition to the commercial form of the content itself, it also supports the realization of the private domain service of the host. Moreover, if the host can continuously produce high - quality paid and free content, they can enter the platform's large membership system. "There is an upper limit to the ceiling of simply selling content, so it is necessary to amplify the service ability of the host and the auxiliary service ability of AI to meet the deeper needs of consumers and thereby generate a higher bargaining power," Liu Zheng said.

In this process, the Ximalaya platform makes the product experience more pure through connection and efficiency improvement. According to the data of paid users, the year - on - year increase of Ximalaya SVIP users in 2024 reached 200%, and the penetration rate of high - consumption vitality users increased by 11.31%.

Source: Ximalaya 2025 Business Partner Conference

In 2024, Ximalaya has successively cooperated with brands such as BOSE and iFLYTEK. This year, Ximalaya plans to make more attempts at content implantation, explore popular content for brand marketing, strengthen the combination of hosts with strong private domain stickiness and brands, and improve the interaction and purchase frequency of high - net - worth users. Different from the fast - consuming content platform and the traditional advertising model, only by making the connection between people and people, and the connection between people and brand owners more extreme, can the super - long consumption stickiness behind podcasts be demonstrated.

More Explorations of Podcast Commercialization

Back to the beginning scene, wearing headphones and listening to novels and stories on podcasts. This behavior not only occurs before going to bed but also runs through a person's morning and evening commutes, fitness runs, and housework time. It can be said that any scene where vision is occupied has become an opportunity for podcasts to break through.

At the Ximalaya 2025 Business Partner Conference, Fu Haibo, Senior Vice President of Ximalaya, said, "Ximalaya often talks about four very important MOTs, the elderly and the children, and the morning and the evening. Many scenes in a person's life require us to provide content supply. For example, the listening proportion of office workers in the work scene to alleviate high - pressure workplace anxiety reaches 50%; 75% of parent - child groups will open the Ximalaya APP before going to bed to accompany them to sleep."

The average daily listening duration of the Ximalaya vehicle - mounted terminal is 65 minutes, and the average monthly active users of its Internet of Things and vehicle - mounted scenarios reach 98 million, with the proportion of BBA users being 24.65%. "The consumption depth and stickiness of the vehicle - mounted scenario determine that it has a larger volume and imagination space," Liu Zheng told Yingke.

Source: Ximalaya 2025 Business Partner Conference

On the other hand, AI is constantly expanding our cognition of business. Focusing on the production, detection, and distribution of content, Ximalaya continues to promote the commercial application of AI. At the conference, Xie Yang, the person in charge of Ximalaya's commercial products, pointed out that the focus of the platform's commercialization is on the efficiency and cost issues of building and connecting users.

In response, last year Ximalaya upgraded the "Wutong Marketing Platform". The "Wutong 3.0 version" introduced the marketing AI Agent as the core hub for delivery, automatically connecting the AI delivery strategy center, the AI data asset center, and the AI material center to improve the efficiency of advertising delivery and reduce the delivery cost. From diverse scenarios to the application of AI, Ximalaya is gradually establishing a complete infrastructure to achieve a deep connection between brand merchants and target users through the iterative upgrade of commercialization tools.

Roundtable Forum Site

Although the ear economy was trending on the hot search last year, the prosperity cannot hide the problems of the podcast industry: a single business model, homogeneous content, and insufficient user stickiness.

The Ximalaya podcast, which has experienced precipitation, with an independent operational thinking, solves the cognitive anxiety of high - net - worth people, and at the same time can also connect the entire online audio platform of Ximalaya to serve the pan - value crowd and connect the multi - dimensional needs of users. Perhaps the podcast backed by the huge business system of the Ximalaya platform will become the key to breaking the deadlock in the commercial growth of the Chinese podcast industry.