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Yesterday, I wrote about the recent Pew research report on podcasting. Today I want to discuss what’s behind the curtain. Let’s try to digest what these numbers really mean.

AUDIENCE SIZE

Pew, Forrester and Nielsen all have done research into the size of the audience for podcasts. All have come up with different numbers. But all three agree that the audience for podcasts is growing quickly.

I happen to think that the podcast audience is a bit larger than most realize, but I also think it’s not as large as it should be. And I think the cause is simple. Podcasters need to find a way to make their podcasts more user friendly. When receiving a podcast is as easy as turning on the television or radio, then the audience will finally grow to the size I think it deserves to be.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Given the fact that the Internet started out as a place that was heavily male-dominated, I am not surprised that the male audience is roughly twice the size of the female audience. I am however, sorry to see that the numbers haven’t balanced out yet. Once again, I think I know why. The content has to be there. If podcasters create content that appeals to women, more women will listen to podcasts. This isn’t brain surgery. It’s up to those of us in the space now to look at this statistic and do something about it. Why? Well folks, podcasting won’t flourish if the female audience doesn’t participate. The marketers all know that the purchasing power of that audience is important. If we can’t provide access to that audience, the marketers will go elsewhere.

COMPETITION

While the audience for podcasts has grown significantly in the last six months, so has the number of podcasters. In fact, according to this study, the growth in audience is not even close to keeping pace with the growth of the podcast providers. This is a similar adoption curve to the early days of the Internet, and I suspect there will be a shakeout that leaves a few hundred strong players. What’s interesting about podcasting is that it doesn’t seem to matter that not every podcaster will be a big hit. More and more niche podcasters are popping up and they have small, but happy and important audiences. So the competition factor isn’t as relevant as it might be if this were another medium.

EXPERIENCE

If you look at the study, you’ll see that the longer someone has been using the Internet, the more likely it is that they will download a podcast. What does that tell us? Again, I think it means that it’s just too hard to find, download and consume podcasts. As an industry, we need to make fixing this problem our top priority. I’m not prepared to answer the question of how we should do it in this post, but I know we need to have this conversation, and quickly.

DOWNLOADS

Much has been made of Pew’s findings that only one percent of podcasters download a podcast each day. I’ve been thinking about this and have an idea that Pew asked this question incorrectly. The question should have been do you LISTEN to podcasts daily, not do you DOWNLOAD podcasts daily. Accordingly, I don’t think this statistic is relevant. It doesn’t make sense to imply that the audience is growing rapidly, yet not consuming the media. As Dr. Phil would say, “that dog won’t hunt.”

CONCLUSION

I see an echo-chamber form every time one of these reports is released to the general public. The podcasting community repeats the headline, the base numbers and congratulates itself on huge increases in podcasting audience and awareness.

The problem is that we need more analysis - not just more cheerleading. As these reports continue to come out, I encourage everyone to sit down and actually read the research, study the methodology and examine what can be learned from the behind-the-scenes numbers. That way, the research will help us shape the industry in a positive manner.

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