Earlier this week we wrote about how audio-streaming jätte (that’s Swedish for “giant’) Spotify is acquiring its way to dominance in the podcasting space.
It stands to reason that Spotify would focus on podcasting. It’s a huge industry, with an incredibly long tail. While at times it seems as if everyone with more than 100 Twitter followers has a podcast (or several podcasts), the real action in podcasting is among the top-ranked shows, which make gobs of money from sponsors who crave access to their highly engaged and loyal audiences.
In the course of researching the Spotify article, I came across this post that Buzzsprout.com updates monthly to digest the latest most relevant new stats about the podcasting industry. I decided to share the best nuggets with all of you interested in podcasting’s emerging role in the media landscape.
Podcasting by the Numbers
- In 2021, 78% of Americans were familiar with podcasts, which is way up from 22% in the early 2000s. And about one-third of Americans (104 million) regularly listen to podcasts.
- For as long as podcasting has been around, it’s been seen as a white consumer’s medium. But the audience is diversifying, even if white listeners remain the dominant demographic. Today, about 57% of U.S. podcast listeners are white. Meanwhile, 16% are Hispanic, 13% are African American, 4% are Asian, and 10% identify as “other.” Nielsen recently reported that “as of last year [2020], the U.S. podcast audience was more diverse than the U.S. itself: 41% was non-White, while only 34% of the U.S. population is non-White.”
- Spotify is the No. 1 podcast directory with a 31.2% share of all podcast listens. Up next is Apple Podcasts at 31.1%. Google Podcasts lags considerably at a pretty darn sad 2.4%.
- Podcast audiences are highly engaged. This helps explain why brands (especially direct to consumer) seem to be climbing over each other to hand A-list podcasters stacks of cash to do ad reads between bits of political conversations, dating advice, comedic takes, or true crime narratives. A 2018 Neilsen survey found 69% of listeners said podcast ads made them more aware of a product, brand, or service. That’s a “wow” number. Would love to see if that figure has gone up since 2018. We did find this recent nugget from Nielsen. “Nielsen’s Podcast Ad Effectiveness (PAE) solutions have found that host-read ads drive a brand recall rate of 71%, which subsequently creates high levels of consumer interest, purchase intent, and recommendation intent.”
- Finding new podcasts to listen to can be a challenge. Buzzsprout says the majority (52.6%) discover new podcasts by searching directories like Apple Podcasts. Another 22.1% said they ask friends for recommendations. Improving podcast discovery feels like an opportunity.
