PODCASTING HYPE CLOUDS REALITY OF WEAK AUDIENCE ADOPTION STATS Kurt Hanson – RAIN Confirming a long-held opinion here at RAIN, a series of recent studies reports that the podcasting “phenomenon" being trumpeted by journalists in recent months is not a true consumer phenomenon at all.
In the latest such study, a report by Forrester Research showed that only 1% of North American households with internet access regularly download and listen to podcasts. A recent blog post from Forrester analyst Charlene Li notes that podcast audiences, "strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content."
Another recent study found that 80% of listened-to podcasts were not actually downloaded to MP3 players at all, but rather listened to as downloaded files on a PC.
This of course makes perfect sense. A married couple in Wisconsin with no radio experience talking to each other for a half-hour a night ("The Dawn and Drew Show" podcast) might be fun to listen to once or twice, and makes for a great piece of journalism, but it wasn't reasonable to expect it to have true mass-market popularity.
My belief is that podcasts — in the sense of short programs automatically downloaded overnight onto MP3 players — are merely a transitional phenomenon, until consumers' mobile devices are Internet-enabled. At that point, it will make sense to simply grab an on-demand stream of the program you're interested in.
And while there will clearly be a good market for on-demand listening to programs (e.g., "Prairie Home Companion" or "WXRT Saturday Morning Flashback"), amateur productions will be no more significant than 'zines are to professional music magazines like Rolling Stone and Paste. And in the long run, as noted above, I believe that such listening to short-form programs will be in the form of on-demand streams, not downloads.
But this allegedly-massive podcasting "phenomenon" is actually just journalists hopping on a bandwagon that's zany and colorful and has a catchy, buzzwordy name. |