A mic sits ready to record in the audio booth used by Feral Audio, the largest podcasting booth in Los Angeles, where many podcasts from the network are recorded. ( Lara Hochuli /San Diego Union-Tribune)

Two women, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, who lounge around while discussing their favorite murders each week, have changed my life.

Maybe you’ve heard of them. Their unassuming podcast, “My Favorite Murder,” has dominated the comedy category of Apple’s podcasts charts for weeks, jostling with and often beating out celebrity names — cough, Joe Rogan — and other highly produced series because, well, no one really knows why exactly. It might be their great rapport, their oddball dark humor or the fact that they talk about the juiciest topic of all — murder.

Whatever the case, fans, who call themselves “Murderinos” and live by the show’s catchphrase (Stay sexy. Don’t get murdered.), are totally obsessed. Started in January, the show now attracts around 450,000 downloads per episode.

https://twitter.com/MyFavMurder/status/771210001390051329

“I’ve never seen a podcast perform like this,” said Dustin Marshall, founder of Feral Audio, the indie podcast network behind the show. “To put that into perspective, ‘My Favorite Murder’ in March had maybe about 20,000 downloads an episode.”

The ladies’ overnight success is a sign that the podcasting industry, which has been around for more than a decade, is at a turning point, one where we could finally see the medium break out from its geeky, niche roots and become something that rivals the television when it comes to audience size and advertiser spending.

“We’re at the tip of an iceberg of a major consumer trend where people are going to discover that they have great options both in quantity and quality of audio entertainment,” said Hernan Lopez, a long-time TV exec who left his job as CEO of Fox International Channels to start the podcast network Wondery, which specializes in fictional content he calls “audio drama.”

In other words, if you aren’t already obsessively tuning into podcasts, you probably will be soon.

That’s because a shift in audio consumption from time and channel-based to on demand is underway, mimicking what happened with video, he says. TV went from live to time-shifted, and then to completely on demand by way of streaming services. Radio — the first iteration of audio — is bound to follow suit, especially with the growing prevalence of Bluetooth-compatible car stereo systems and smartphone-powered vehicle dashboards such as Apple’s CarPlay system.

Currently, an estimated 35 million people 12 and over in the U.S. listen to podcasts weekly, representing 13 percent of the total population, according to data from Edison Research, which closely monitors the industry. That may seem unimpressive but the podcasting space is double what it was five years ago, and it’s still growing, said Tom Webster, vice president of strategy and marketing at Edison Research.

“One the one hand, the medium has never grown exponentially in the way online video or streaming music has,” Webster said. “It’s grown steadily and linearly.”

On the other, podcasting has never been properly promoted to mainstream audiences, so the inflection point will happen when major media outfits start showing you ads for podcasts on TV, he said. It’s not happening now, but the biggest names in media are already pumping millions into podcasting — the E.W. Scripps Company just bought podcast app Stitcher in June for $4.5 million — so it’s only a matter of time.

Maybe the time is now. Apple, the largest podcast platform with about two-thirds share of the market, is preparing to celebrate a huge milestone: 10 billion global podcast episode downloads and streams in a single calendar year. So, if it hasn’t happened already, your “A Ha!” moment is just around the corner.

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Karen and Georgia — who, at this point, feel like my close and equally twisted friends — have taken me down a rabbit hole of podcast curiosity. Your audio awakening may not be with a true crime show that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Perhaps it will be “Revisionist History,” the Malcolm Gladwell series that makes you reconsider what you think you know about events past and present. Maybe it will be something more familiar from the old-school radio veterans behind “This American Life.” Or it could be “Heavyweight,” a brand-new show whose host helps others dissect and settle squabbles big and small.

The point is that there is quite literally something for everybody. Apple’s inventory alone includes more than 350,000 active podcasts, along with over 12 million episodes of audio content in more than 100 languages.

Of course, quality varies dramatically, meaning not all shows are created equal. In recent years, a plethora of podcast networks have sprouted up to produce must-listen-to shows and court advertisers into the fold. Networks such as Gimlet Media, Feral Audio, Wondery and Panoply aim to be the NBCs, HBOs, PBSs and CNNs of this new realm; all firmly rooted in the belief that great shows will draw large audiences — and eventually, make lots of money.

Already, the listener numbers are impressive. The average show on Feral’s network attracts between 10,000 and 50,000 podcast downloads an episode, Marshall said. But “My Favorite Murder,” well, that’s going to hit more than 6 million unique downloads a month alone.

While not exactly comparable to the viewership for top TV shows, the numbers are approaching the more humble audience sizes of some cable TV shows. Take AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire,” which is averaging 337,000 viewers per episode in its third season.

Source: Edison Research and Triton Digital BETO ALVAREZ U-T Podcast listening Percentage of U.S. population who have ever listened to a podcast: Total population age 12 and older 36% 33% 30% 27% 29% 25% 23% 22% 18% 13% 11% ’16 ’15 ’14 ’13 ’12 ’11 ’10 ’09 ’08 ’07 ’06

Meanwhile, the upper echelon of podcasts, which includes the true crime sensation “Serial” and NPR’s “Invisibilia,” all draw millions of downloads per episode. And advertisers are finally paying attention.

“We think the (podcasting) market is a $100 million to $150 million industry right now,” said Brendan Monaghan, CEO of the podcast network Panoply, which is part of Graham Holdings Company’s The Slate Group. “Radio is a $17 billion market.”

Founder of Feral Audio, Dustin Marshall, sits in front of the audio booth, where many Feral Podcasts are recorded. (Lara Hochuli/San Diego Union-Tribune)

Launched in February of last year, Panoply’s aim is, in part, to realize the financial opportunities of the podcasting medium, and help others less versed in the ins and outs of the space do the same. The company partners with familiar media brands — say Rolling Stone or The Wall Street Journal — and helps with ad sales, production or tech needs. It then shares an undisclosed percentage of revenue from ads with its partners.

One of Panoply’s biggest success stories is the aforementioned series, “Revisionist History,” which was No. 1 on Apple’s podcast charts for nearly 10 weeks running. The show was a collaboration between Panoply’s team and Gladwell’s team, with the famous author supplying the ideas and the podcast network assisting with production resources and ad sales.

Though Monaghan declined to share specific listener and revenue figures, he did say his network’s shows secure ad rates between $25 and $100 for every 1,000 listeners. It follows, then, that a top podcast, say with half a million downloads per episode, could be making $10,000 to $50,000 per episode.

Though we’re still in the “training wheels era” of podcast advertising, as Edison’s Webster characterized it, advertisers have found podcast audiences to be more captive than audiences elsewhere.

“If you watch a TV ad about a product, it may change your opinion about the product. But when you have an advertiser supporting a podcast, there is an intimate relationship between the host of the podcast and the listener,” Webster said. “There’s a different twist here. It’s not so much that the audience member thinks, I should try this product. Rather, the person thinks, this company is supporting the show that I love.”

This host-listener connection contributes to what’s called brand lift, or a positive shift in consumer awareness and perception. And that means the podcast industry has finally matured beyond an experimental playground for advertisers and grown into a viable medium for the kind of brand awareness campaigns typically reserved for radio and TV.

Of course, that also means an onslaught of advertisers are racing to join the podcasting fray. (Maybe you’ve noticed more ads inserted before, during and after into your favorite shows?) But advertisers presence could ruin the format by overwhelming shows with bad or excessive ads, though listeners can always fast-forward through them.

If we're successful, you're not going to turn on the FM dial. — Steve Henn

Perhaps, the only other major threat to the medium is the name itself. Derived from Apple’s iPod, the term “podcast” isn’t entirely approachable to the masses some say, nor is it a name that everyone agrees should represent the whole of on-demand digital audio.

Take Apple rival Amazon, which has begun to invest heavily in podcasting, albeit by avoiding the term entirely. The company, which acquired audio book app Audible for $300 million back in 2008, has upgraded Audible to include something new called, “Channels.” Channels, according to Amazon, are audio series that can be listened to on demand. In other words, they’re podcasts.

“What Audible is trying to do here is get down to the atomic level and remind you that these are just shows,” Webster said. “A podcast, technically, is a mechanism of delivery. Audible is reminding you that these are shows.”

Steve Henn, a veteran radio journalist who left NPR to create 60dB (pronounced “sixty dee bee”), a yet-to-launch app for listening to super-short audio clips, has also rejected the term.

“We're calling it ‘stories’,” he said. “People tend to think of (a podcast) as something that is much longer than what we're aiming to do. So we’re pushing back against that.”

When it launches, 60dB will provide listeners with a personalized feed of five to seven minute audio stories spanning news, sports, entertainment, science and the like. The app’s one button, car-friendly interface is, like traditional radio, intended to make listening to digital audio something you can do with little commitment. Tune in. Tune out.

“I’m doing this because I think radio, the kind of radio that I made for years, is going to be distributed in different ways,” said Henn, who believes his direct competition is radio. “If we're successful, you're not going to turn on the FM dial.”

Henn, who is partnered with two Netflix alums on the endeavor, might be on to something, particularly as voice-based personal assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home enter more American households and replace the radio’s role in providing brief news updates.

So maybe the name, podcast, has, in fact, been holding back the medium for years.

“If you had tried to listen to a podcast 10 years ago, you found it difficult,” said Edison’s Webster. “There was an awful lot of friction. That’s not true now but maybe you still have that association.”

As the industry matures, and the major players cooperate more, he suspects we'll settle on “shows.”

Call it whatever you want, just give us Murderinos more Karen and Georgia and I’m sure we’ll be happy.

jennifer.vangrove@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1840 Twitter: @jbruin

UPDATES:

10:59 a.m.: This article was updated with the most recent figures on episode downloads for the “My Favorite Murder” podcast.