Courtesy of one of my COM300 students -> The BBC reports aForrester assertion that the podcast audience is primarily "tech savvy, young males" … "despite the hype surrounding [podcasts]."
Harrumph. We are in still in the early adoption stage of this technology! I’m certain that I could examine popular press reports less than two years after Tim Berners-Lee created HTTP (and, thu, the web) and find equally dismissive headlines/research/forecasts.
From the report:
The survey of 5,000 US consumers by Forrester found that 3% had tried listening to a podcast.
Of them, 2% had experimented with audio downloads but did not listen on a regular basis.
There will be just 700,000 diehard downloaders in the US this year; a
tiny audience compared to the 25 million people who tune into stations
run by traditional broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR) every week.
Contrast that with these hard data from the UK, with a fraction of the US population (although I know US folks who regularly listen to BBC podcasts). In February, the BBC had 1.7 million downloads of its content. Anyone have data on NPR downloads per month?
BBC has been an innovator in this space. It just launched a podcast on Ouch, its disability website. Site goal: "to reflect the lives of disabled people… We’re about personal stuff, minutiae of everyday life and that
fantastic dark sense of humour and inevitable cynicism that we disabled
people tend to have. Oh, and we don’t shy away from subjects that other
people might be a bit wary of."
