Sure-fire Evidence that Podcasting is on the Rise
March 23rd, 2007 by support
By now I’m assuming you’re familiar with podcasting. You may have a number of favorites of your own, you may have listened to our inaugural episode with Phil Johnson and Mike O’Toole. But what about the long-term sustainability and adoption of such technology? What’s the market saying about it?
PodcastingNews reports that Tom Weber, a VP at Edison Media Research is about to release a report on the state of the podcast industry, and it’s good news. There’s still a way to go, but it’s reassuring to see the trends at play.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- There is an 18% increase in audience growth over the last year: from 11% in 2006 to 13% in 2007
- Awareness of podcasting grew from 22% to 37% - that’s 70% growth!
- But there is still difficulty with the term “podcasting,” much like the term “blogging” before it
- Podcasters must do a better job of selling the benefits of podcasting rather than the features
While these numbers might not be entirely rosy, they certainly present an opportunity for those wishing to rise to the challenge.
Some demographics:
- The audience is a fairly even split: 49% female, 51% male
- All ages, with - get this - more listeners in the 55+ range than the 18-24 range
- Well-to-do. Podcast users are twice as likely to have incomes over 100K and nearly twice as likely to have incomes between 75K and 100K
- Podcast users are twice as likely to have clicked on a banner ad
A couple of inherent flaws in the study: Edison defines podcasting a little too narrowly from a content/program standpoint and they only refer to downloaded files. True podcasting can take a variety of formats and call be consumed directly online.
But most interesting (to me, at least) are Tom Weber’s Parthian shot - a challenge, of sorts:
Consumer-controlled content is clearly the future for both audio and video, and podcasting, by whatever name you choose to call it, is the precursor to that vision of the future. But realizing that vision takes vision–and persistence. If you think podcasting isn’t “broken,” think on these graphs again. 15 million more Americans learned about podcasting this year, and the vast majority responded…”meh.” You can grouse about the numbers, you can grumble about mainstream America’s apparent inability to grasp how great podcasting is, and you can blog about “the end of podcasting.” Somewhere, though, somebody will see this data for what it is–a challenge to work harder, to claim the greater prize. Some of you reading this will do the work to make podcasting different, and better, than it is today–and those people have the opportunity to reap great rewards.
Be sure to take a look at the full release by PodcastingNews - there’s a much more in-depth analysis.