Forrester: Podcast Usage Just 1% But Growth Expected

Posted on April 6, 2006

Charlene Li at Forrester Research blogs about their new report that shows only 1% of North American online households regularly listen to podcasts.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn't as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there's lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

It is a small percentage but Charlene says Forrester predicts podcasting will grow from 700,000 households in the US in 2006 to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. The time commitment is high when it comes to creating a quality podcast and this sometimes leads to podfading. However, hot trends like Godcasting and new tools like Gcast, that make podcasting easier, should help Podcasting grow quickly.