Monday, March 13, 2006
Podcasts…A Surprising Audience and Big Growth
byA couple of recent reports raise the ante on the importance of podcasts. A BIGreseach report (story here) shows some surprising demographic information. Many media pundits have minimized the importance of podcasts asserting the people subscribing to them were either first adopters or young geeks. However, according to the research, the core podcast market is already far more mainstream:
- Average income of $67,854
- Married
- Predominantly 18-44 age group
- Male (64%)
- Occupation is professional/managerial
The size of the market is also accelerating fast. A new eMarketer report highlighted here, shows podcasts will reach 50 million people by 2010. Podcast advertising will also rise from $80 million in 2006 to $300 million by 2010.
I can speak first hand on podcasts (also see earlier post here). I just completed another long road trip and my listening consisted exclusively to over 20 hours of podcast programming that only filled a small fraction of my iPod mini’s capacity. If any of you love travel, you might appreciate a point to some of the programming I was listening to. The link is for Travel with Rick Steves. Each of the programs is almost an hour. You can download the MP3s directly from his site or sign up for automatic subscriber downloads at the iTunes store.
These reports indicate podcasts are becoming more important for affluent consumers, and consequently, marketers.
