Whatever the reasons, podcast listening figures began to climb again after 2014.

In 2015, as if to seal their new, post-Serial legitimacy, Barack Obama appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast: the first appearance of a sitting president in an online podcast. The rise of Trump and the Brexit debate seemed to stimulate news and political podcasters, with two of the most respected shows, Pod Save America and The New York Times Daily, launching in 2017. Most of all though, the period after 2014 was marked by experiment and testing the boundaries of the new, booming medium.