Forrester -- just 1% use podcasts

Forrester research has just released a brief, Podcasting Hits The Charts. It's only available to clients, but Forrester analyst Charlene Li has put a summary on her blog. She writes:



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)



In other words, podcasting's main appeal at the moment is time-shifting professionally-produced programmes. It's a variant of tape recording, and should probably be called AOD (audio on demand).

She says:



Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. (See Forrester's "The Future Of Digital Audio" report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the US this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.



Comment: There are some curious "death of podcasting" reactions, when Forrester is actually predicting that podcasting will grow 17.5 fold in the US in the next four years. However, while it's useful to have someone try to pin the genre down, I suspect that the reality is more confused. Does the BBC's replay facility count as podcasting? How about the same kind of radio programme downloaded from iTunes? And even if we distinguish between the various options, do the people Forrester asks about their use of podcasting? As Charlene Li says: "measurement is still really hard to do."

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