British podcasting data released

• RAJAR, the UK audio measurement company, have released their MIDAS Winter 2017 research. Lots in here about podcasting:

  • 6.1 million adults listen to podcasts in every week
  • 67% of podcasting adults use a smartphone to listen
  • 35% of podcasts that are downloaded are not listened to
  • Podcasting accounts for 3% of total listening time; “Listen Again”, predominantly BBC time-shifted output (which is arguably the same thing) adds another 1%
  • 20% of 25-34's listen to podcasts. Just 6% of people aged 55+ do.
  • 62% of podcast listeners are male
  • Podcast use on “Voice activated speakers” (the Amazon Echo or Google Home) is virtually zero.
  • Podcasts reach their highest audience between 8.15-8.30am, though there’s another peak at 6.00-6.30pm.

• US data from NPR and Edison Research was announced at CES today: The Smart Audio Report says lots of positive things about smart speakers (two-thirds are Amazon Echo, by the way). The word “podcasting” doesn’t appear in the report, although it notices a high degree of use for news bulletins.

• Google has quietly rolled out What can your Assistant do? - lots of things you can ask your Google Home or Google Assistant to do. Oddly, Podnews is one of only two results for a search for 'podcasts’ - even though “OK, Google, play This American Life podcast” (for example) works just fine.

  • “OK, Google - ask podnews to play in full” is a good trick, if you can master a way of reading “podnews” that Google doesn’t think is related to Harry Potter.

• Here’s a guy who really wants to work for Spotify - we think he’s called James Desin. He’s posted, among other things, some nice ideas for making podcasts look better in Spotify - and suggests, not unreasonably, that Spotify should also offer audiobooks too. Worth taking a look: not just for the Spotify folk who get Podnews, but also for other podcast apps. This is the sort of super-fan worth talking to.

• Kate Chisholm at The Spectator posts a piece called Podcasts have a long way to go to catch up with radio - ignore the headline, though, it’s an interesting look at the differences in her mind between podcasting and the broadcast output of the BBC.

  
  Jul 29 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Hernan Lopez, the founder and CEO of Wondery, asks Is Your Brand On Mute? - pointing out that it needs an audio identity as well as a visual one. “Sound is where the emotion comes from -- sound stimuli are the first to be perceived by the brain, at 0.146 seconds. Then touch at 0.149, then sight at 0.189.”

• At Podcon in Seattle in December, there was a talk by Multitude Productions about podcast monetization, community and social media. They’ve published their slides, notes, audio and more. Bravo!

• In case you missed it - here’s Podnews’s Managing Editor James Cridland, talking at Ozpod 2017 in Sydney wth lots of data about podcasting. He would like you to know that he is a very good conference speaker and is available for your event. He is also massively handsome, excellent value, and a really very, very nice man who would never hijack an edition of Podnews to promote himself.

Thank you to Podknife for their support - Podknife is a curated podcast information and review site.