What Your True Crime Obsession Reveals About You

Colton, we've been working in the podcast space for the last five years.

The true crime genre is the biggest genre when it comes to podcasts.

In the US alone, over 100 million people have consumed true crime content.

And on Netflix, true crime shows are reaching 50 to 70 million households globally per title.

Why are humans so curious with death?

The simple answer to that is because we can tell stories about death, right? We can tell stories about people who are dangerous that we may not know about.

And if any other animal could do that, they certainly would.

That's so interesting about the stories, because when you think of, uh, like a true crime story, I guess there's no other type of content that has a natural beginning, a middle and an end.

And I guess if you start at this person is, is dead and then we're gonna find out how they died.

I, I guess that's what takes you through that narrative storytelling and why we're all fascinated with that.

And we're, you know, I guess storytelling's been around for thousands of years.

Yeah, I think one of the questions I get is, is it just the mystery, right? Is that why we love true crime? Because there's a mystery there.

And I think that's some of it.

But most things are mysterious to us.

I have no idea how I am talking to you from thousands of miles away, and I could not rebuild that if I needed to.

That's a complete mystery to me.

But I probably would not be able to make a documentary that 100 million people would watch if I made a documentary about podcasting or about how microphones work or about how video cameras

work.

But if you can make a podcast about any random serial killer, you'll get 100 million views on it pretty easily, right? So there are certain kinds of mysteries in life that we are more drawn to, and we tend to be most drawn to mysteries that unveil something about, in particular, dangerous people, but also other kinds of dangerous situations, natural disasters or...

You know, aliens are kind of big in the news right now with all the disclosure stuff in the US going on, and are they potentially dangerous or not dangerous? So stories about things that can hurt us or might hurt us if we were to encounter them tend to be the types of mysteries that we are most intrigued by, most interested in, and sort of hunger for the most in the media landscape.

So why is it that more women are drawn to true crime than men?

I think there are a few answers to that.

So one is that most true crime stories focus a bit on the killer and their thoughts, right? Why did they do what they do? That's one of the questions that a lot of true crime stories, whether it's a podcast or a they focus on trying to answer why did the killer do what they did and how did they get to that point right and if you look across the the data in psychology on things like empathy or perspective taking women tend to score a bit higher in that so on average women score higher in things like perspective taking they score higher in interest in other people than men do So I think that's one part of the picture is that you're telling a story that's very human, right? You're telling a story that's about two people in some sort of interaction.

And so I think that tends to skew toward women a bit more.

But I don't think that explains the full picture.