A new report to be released in eMarketer this week has found that spending on advertising in podcasts will quintuple over the next five years from the current estimate of a $80 million base during 2006 to create a $400 million market in 2011.
So where is the growth expected to come from? Well, eMarketer’s analyst James Belcher has predicted that much of that growth will come from Google.
Harris Interactive have released a new poll gauging the online viewing habits of American adults. The survey was completed by 2,309 online Americans for Harris Interactive in December 2006. They found that nearly 16% of those surveyed were regular YouTube users and of these one in three stated that they are actually watching less traditional television because of the time they spend on YouTube.
The survey also found that 42% of the surveyed American adults had watched an online video at YouTube and that 14% would consider themselves regular users.
The latest radio listener survey statistics collated by the Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RAJAR), the UK’s definitive radio audience survey make for some very encouraging reading indeed!
The findings revealed that radio listening is at an all time high with more than 45 million people tuning in every week. What was really positive is that this growth has been attributed to the fact that more and more people are listening to radio through the internet or via mobile phones or portable devices. The number of people listening via mobile phones was up by 24% and listening via the internet was up 10 per cent .
The figures also included statistics for podcasts and…. over the last 3 months the number of people downloading and listening to podcasts has significantly increased to 2.1 million people representing a significant increase of over 15% over the last quarter.
The fact that the internet and mobile devices are responsible for these increases means that its only a matter of time before listeners discover other, “on-demand” media on offer.
Shouldn’t you be Podcasting? Now is the time to get it out there and watch your audience figures snowball.
Last year computing giant IBM decided that it was time to jump on board with podcasting to see what it could do for them. They began with a simple idea for a show called “IBM and the future of…..” featuring its scientists and staff gaining their soapboxes to discuss worldly topics from driving to urban planning. Even with these early forays into podcasting, IBM managed to log 40,000 downloads during the first three months. The series now has six instalments available.
The success of the “Future” series has since lead IBM to look at other ways to harness the power of podcasting and released a tool for uploading audio files and syndicating them via RSS feeds on an internal system. By publishing a podcasting policy, IBM sat back and waited to see what its 7000 employees would create.
There’s more compelling evidence of the rapid growth of online video announced on the back of the Apple TV launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
The Diffusion Group published their latest report on IP Media entitled Broadband Media: Redefining the Television Experience, where senior analyst and author Colin Dixon predicts that by 2011, 162 million households worldwide will have access to online video via their primary household TV. The report predicts that the future still lies with the distribution of online video content via setup simialar set-top boxes, broadband enabled games consoles and media centre like the Apple TV and Microsoft Windows Media Center.
It’s a common miscomception amongst those new to the medium that podcasts can only be listened to on Apples iPod device. Indeed, the iPod is the namesake of podcasting and hugely popular but the majority of podcast subscribers still listen to most podcast content on their computers.
There are of course other ways too, there are other brands of mp3 players and of course mobile phones.
But now, thanks to a partnership between manufacturer Skullcandy McGyver and mypodder you can now listen to podcasts on your wristwatch!!!
Commercially available music could soon be legally appearing in podcasts if recent talks between Radio Centre and the music rights organisations prove successful.
The deal with the PPL who collect royalties for artists and labels, will allow radio stations to podcast 30 seconds of music (excluding voice-overs). It will be available to commercial radio stations as a one year blanket license and looks set to cost them around £100,000. On top of this, commercial radio will have to secure the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and the Performing Right Society (PRS) licenses. This is likely to bring the total cost to £210,000.
Podcasting at the end of 2006 is still a fairly new medium, so there are many myths and misconceptions, the three most common are explained here
Last week media research group Arbitron held their conference panel in Columbia, USA to discuss the future of audience growth within the radio industry. Traditional radio, especially in the United States is going through extreme changes.
Competition for listeners between stations is becoming more intense and podcasting is starting to steal listeners attention, as a result listening times and numbers have declined.
A New Way for Audiences to Find Your Podcast
There is a multitude of directories available on the web to catalogue podcasts and make them searchable and easy for your audience to find such as Podcast Pickle, Podcast Alley and Odeo which, incidentally is now up for sale.
However, searching for podcasts on particular subjects as become even easier thanks to a new podcast search engine called Blabline powered by none other than the Google co-op.
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