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Here's a stat to make you feel old.

Podcasts are turning 20.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Okay. Karino. Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now catch-all term for digital audio shows goes back, of course, to the Apple iPod.

And it's been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes.

Here's Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference.

We're going to list thousands of podcasts, and you'll be able to click on them,

download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes.

So what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning?

And where might it go from here?

We asked Nick Kwa, the podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine.

So, my understanding is that there wasn't really a business bottle.

A lot of the early podcasts were just people making stuff and, like, you know, posting stuff around.

And the sort of analogy of the blog, like, that rose with the rights of Google AdSense, like just these banner ads that you see

on the internet, like that was the early form of monetizing

blogs and websites. There wasn't quite anything like that for

audio, for podcasts at the time. That being said, that this

was, you know, the sort of mid-2000s or late 2000 era was

...