US Podcast Audience up 22% since last year
Edison Research today released their annual joint study, with Arbitron, of Americans’ radio consumption habits – and it shows that podcasting continues its steady, unrelenting growth.
According to the report, the podcast audience has grown by 22% since last year, expanding from 18% of all Americans in 2008 to 22% in 2009.
Edison’s study, “The Infinite Dial 2009” (pdf) details how we listen (and, with online video, how we watch) to online radio offerings, including podcasts.
Among the study’s findings:
- Social Networking: Listeners to online radio are more likely to have a profile on a social networking site (like MySpace, Facebook, or even LinkedIn), 54%, than the general population, of whom 34% have a social network presence.
- Internet Video: As you probably expected, Internet video consumption exploded last year, with approximately 69 million, or 27% of people, watching online video sometime in the past week. That figure is up from 18% in 2008.
- Portable Media Players: More than four in ten people (42%) own an iPod, iPhone, or other kind of portable media/mp3 player, and among the 12 – 44 year-old crowd, that percentage jumps to above 50 percent. The “key radio demographic” of 35-to 54-year-olds are becoming more frequent online radio listeners.
- Podcast Audience: Forty-three percent of Americans are aware of podcasts, up from 37% last year. Twenty-two percent of Americans have ever listened to a podcast (up from 18% in 2008), and approximately 27 million (or 11%) have listened to one in the past month (up from 9% last year).
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