80% of Podcasts Never Make it to a Portable Player?
Podcasting, for me, is fundamentally based on a listenening experience of control and convenience. The listener controls when, where and how they listen to the program.
(Podcasting is also based on the social media revolution and dissillusion with the mainstream “one-way-pipe” media that has spoon fed us for years now, but I want to focus on the control/convenience in this post.)
There are two criteria that offer the listener control/convenience and define a podcast for me.
- A digital audio file that is downloaded
- The file is made available through a subscription feed (even though some listeners may just download it from the site).
A podcast can be listened to on either a computer or an MP3 player (not just iPods) and it’s still a podcast. Apparently the scholars at the Oxford Dictionary think differently. Here’s Oxford’s definition of podcast which they added last year.
n.podcast a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.
I’d like to respectfully disagree. There are a couple things that bug me in this definition.
- It makes it sound like podcasts are only for portable audio players
- There’s no mention of feeds
A podcast does not have to be listened to on a portable player to be a podcast, though, I’m sure Apple doesn’t mind that preconception. If you’re a podcaster or podcast advertiser, it’s important to understand a show is consumed.
The Diffusion Group states that 80% of podcasts never make it to a portable player, they are either listened on the computer or deleted. I’d like to see these numbers broken down more myself. What percent is listened on the computer? What percent is deleted?
Podtrac recently revealed some very interesting figures. Based on their survey of 19,508 podcast listeners, they report that 41% listen on their computer and 56% listen on their MP3 player. This information is available on the Tech Podcast Roundtable video from March 11th starting at the 34m49s mark.
It looks like Oxford Dictionary and some podcasters may need to re-think their preconceptions about podcast consumption.
Michael Geoghagen and Paul Colligan also chime in on this subject.
March 25th, 2006 10:48
[...] My own thought is that the defining aspect of a podcast seems to be the use of RSS to automatically deliver the files, and that opinion seems to be backed by the comments left for the study’s authors not to mention the wikipedia entry on podcasting. But what is driving the growth in podcasting is the underlying ‘my media - my way’ philosophy. Listen when you want. Listen how you want. Whether that’s at 2 am in front of the desktop, 7am on a burned CD over the car stereo during the morning commute or 7pm at the gym with your MP3 player. It’s your choice. [...]