Nobody Reads on the Drive Home: Your Writing Needs an Audio Version

Picture the person you write for. They're behind the wheel, working through the last eleven miles of the drive home. Your article is still sitting, unread, in an open tab on the laptop. They meant to come back to it. But with everything else going on today, they just never found the time.

You'll take it personally. But don't.

When the Danish news outlet Zetland went looking for why members were quitting, they were braced for complaints about the journalism. What they got instead were apologies. People weren't leaving because the writing was bad. They were leaving because they never found the time to read it.

Zetland didn't take this as a cue to start writing shorter. They saw it as an opportunity to give every article a voice.

Your audience didn't run out of interest. They ran out of time. Time that requires their eyes and hands free. The other kind, the time that only needs their ears, they still have hours to give to you.

Your audience already listens.

Count the time they can't read: the commute, the dishes, the dog, the treadmill. An hour of yard work on Saturday. That's not dead time. It's the largest block of attention your audience has left in a day, and it's the one block your writing can't reach.

Somebody is reaching it. In early 2026, 81% of Americans age 12 and older had listened to online audio in the past month — 233 million people, an all-time high. In the same survey, podcasting passed radio for the first time as the leading platform for spoken-word listening. U.S. audiobook revenue grew another 9% last year, to $2.43 billion.

It isn't a young-person habit, either. The fastest-growing group is the oldest one: monthly online audio among Americans 55 and up went from 52% in 2024 to 70% in 2026.

Ask listeners why and it's the same answer across the board — their hands are full. 43% of U.S. adults actively seek out audio because it's less tiring than video, since it gives their eyes a break and still holds their attention. A survey of more than 5,000 listeners across five European markets found the same thing: "doing other things at the same time" was the number one reason people started listening, in every market.

So your readers aren't turning down your writing. They're turning up the volume on everything they can actually listen to.

Everybody guesses low.

What share of your audience would use an audio version? Ten percent? Twenty?

Zetland guessed about the same. They put an audio button on articles in 2016 expecting 10 to 20% of readers to touch it. Within months it was more than half. Today it's above 80% of everything they publish, and listeners finish close to 90% of what they start.

That's not a feature a handful of your audience uses. That's how the audience consumes you.

It holds outside Denmark, too, and it shows up in the numbers that pay the bills. The Washington Post found that readers who listened to audio articles engaged more than three times longer with the content. The Economist's deputy editor Tom Standage said the quiet part out loud: the audio edition "is a very effective retention tool. Once you come to rely on it, you won't unsubscribe".

And you don't need a newsroom for this to work. For example, Substack reports that writers who add audio or video to their publications grow their mailing lists and revenue 2.5 times faster than writers who don't.

Your reader isn't getting a lesser version.

The thought that stops a lot of writers, even once they understand the upside, is whether audio will flatten their work. You worked on that sentence. You moved the clause to the end so it would land. And now it's going to get read out while somebody unloads the dishwasher.

Audio isn't going to butcher your prose. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies how reading works, settles the first half of that worry. Once the words have been identified — by eye or by ear — the same mental process comprehends the sentences they form. Reading and listening overlap considerably.

The other half of the worry is backwards. Listening carries something the page doesn't. Inflection, pace, emphasis: on the page, a reader has to supply all of it themselves. A narration hands it over. Willingham's examples are sarcasm and Shakespeare, both of which land more easily heard than read.

The clause you leaned on is the clause they hear you lean on.

And a reader who wants to slow down and hold a line still can. A read-along player keeps the text on screen, moving with the voice, so a sentence somebody wants again is one tap away.

This is the objection that actually stops people.

Big publishers with big budgets can solve it the expensive way. Staff, studios, journalists reading their own copy into a microphone. That's the version of audio most writers picture, and it's a fair picture: a quiet room, three takes because the dog barked, an hour of editing, a file to host somewhere. Then all of it again next week. Forever.

That isn't a trade-off. That's a hard pass.

But it's also out of date. Audible now runs AI narration as a standard production path for publishers, across English, Spanish, French and Italian. Spotify's audiobook catalog went from 150,000 titles to more than 700,000 in two years, listening hours rose 60% year over year, and in 2026 it began building AI narration directly into its tools for authors. The part that used to cost a newsroom a whole department now takes you a few minutes.

Something else is out of date, and it matters more: what a synthetic voice actually sounds like.

If they want it badly enough, your readers can find audio options. Their browser will read the page aloud in that flat, mechanical voice you've heard a hundred times — mispronouncing your name, sailing straight through your section breaks like they aren't there, landing every sentence the same way. That's the version of your writing most of them will never choose, and it's the one you're leaving them with by default.

That stopped being the bar a while ago. Audible and Spotify are not putting synthetic voices in front of paying subscribers because they're cheap and bad. You can now produce audio your audience genuinely enjoys listening to, without a studio, a budget, or a second career in editing.

Your reader isn't weighing your essay against a big-budget audiobook production. They're weighing how easy it is to listen against how much work it takes to read. And against that, a good voice reading your words on the drive home wins every time.

The newsrooms already moved.

People with budgets have made this call. In January 2026, a Reuters Institute survey of senior media leaders found 71% of publishers investing more heavily in audio.

Audio also holds up against AI summarization in a way bare text doesn't. Text-only work gets scraped, condensed, and handed to somebody as a three-line answer with your name in small type. A narration is the thing itself. It has to be experienced to be consumed.

And cost stopped being the barrier there too. The BBC has trialed synthetic audio presenters for football bulletins, noting that producing that much audio the traditional way "would be prohibitively expensive".

If the BBC reaches for a synthetic voice to make the volume work, you're in good company.

They have audio teams. You have us.

The gap has finally closed. The publishers above got here with staff, contracts and vendors. All you need is a few minutes.

That's what Allmagine is for. Paste your text or drop in a link. Pick a voice. You get a narration with its own page, a link you can share anywhere, and a read-along player you can embed on your own site — the text lighting up as the voice reads, so a listener can follow along or tap back to a line they missed.

You already have the audience. What's missing is the format they can actually use.

And you don't have to write anything new to start. Your archive is inventory. The essay you're proudest of is already written, and right now it's silent.

Take that one and give it a voice. No account needed until you generate.

So which post will you start with?