101: Updates on the Latest Podcast Industry Data
What’s This Episode About?
How many people are actually listening to podcasts?
Is the number of podcast listeners still growing or has it finally leveled off?
What's the gender breakdown of podcast listeners?
What's the age breakdown of podcast listeners?
Every year Edison Research and Triton Digital releases a report called The Infinite Dial where they breakdown the latest data on a variety of digital media and platforms; including podcasting.
The Infinite Dial 2021 was released yesterday and now I'm breaking down the most applicable podcast data provided in the report; including the answers to the questions above.
I also provide a follow-up on the 100 episode celebration giveaway.
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 101 of podcasting for coaches. As promised, in our special giveaway episode last week, I am going to talk about the winners for the giveaway. I'm just going to do it at the end of the episode, because these updates here are more important. So to start off, we're going to talk about the results from Edison researches infinite dial 2021 that just came out yesterday as of the release of this episode. And if you're unfamiliar with Edison research, or the infinite dial, basically, they are kind of the end all be all in media consumption data. And infinite dial actually covers a lot of different things, audio books, social media usage, smart speaker usage, smart watch uses all kinds of things. And yes, of course, podcasting. So every year those of us in the podcasting industry are like little kids waiting to open their presents on Christmas, when we know that this report is coming. Because it always has some interesting insights. And this year is no different. The great thing is overall podcasting has continued to grow, which is not surprising. And the reason that this data is important for me to bring to you is because if you're on the fence about starting a podcast, this might help convince you that it can be a very powerful platform, it might help put your mind at ease. And if you already have a podcast, it might help you if you're approaching pod fade, you're feeling a little bit burnt out, your show is not performing quite the way you want it to any of those things. So I'm just going to jump right into the data here because I don't want this episode to go super long. And we do obviously still have to talk about the giveaway at the end. Okay, so the infinite dial applies just to the United States. So listeners in the US they do have other versions that they do for like Australia and Canada. So you can check it out in the show notes for this episode. Just go to podcasting for coaches comm click on episodes in the main menu and then go to episode number 101. And that will have the link to Edison researchers website where you can register for the webinar for the infinite dial for Australia or Canada if you're in one of those countries. If you are based in another country, though, it is not all that rare for the majority of your podcast listeners to still be based in the United States. So even if you do host your podcast in another country, this information is still relevant to you. So to gather the data for this report, they actually surveyed people ages 12 and above. So everything in this report, keep that in mind ages 12 and up. So first off 78% of the US population, which is about 222 million people are familiar with the term podcasting. This is up from 75% and 2020 57%. So 162 million people say that they have listened to a podcast in the past. And this is up from 55% in 2020. Now, those are kind of some general data is okay, cool. podcasting in general is becoming a little more mainstream. Yeah, they might have checked out an episode of once, big deal. This next data is a restart dialing in and a little bit more to talk about the actual consumers for podcast. So 41% of the US population, which is 116 million people say they've listened to a podcast in the last month. That is up from 37% in 2020. So that one took a pretty big jump of those monthly listeners 50% which is 50 million people are aged 12 to 34 29%. So 34 million people are aged 35 to 54 and 21% 24 million people are ages 55 plus. So no matter what age your target audience is, there are millions upon millions of podcast listeners in that age group. Of those monthly listeners 51% are male 46% are female, and 3% identified as non binary or other. What's interesting about this Is that according to Edison research, female podcast listeners have reached an all time high. So if your target audience are females, there literally has never been a better time for you to podcast. Alright, so 28% of the US population, which is 80 million people say they've listened to a podcast in the last week. This is up from 24% in 2020. And of those weekly listeners, they averaged eight podcast episodes in the last week, and 5.1 different shows in the last week. So the number of weekly podcast listeners have not only grown, but they're consuming more podcast content than they ever have before. And the last little interesting bit of data from this report is that and this should be no shocker. If you listen to other episodes of this show, Spotify is by far the most popular platform for what they call online audio, which basically means streaming music. Now, I don't want you to confuse that with podcast because it does not mean podcast. So when I say Spotify is by far the most popular, they're not comparing it to Apple podcasts, because it's not the same thing. They did compare it to Apple Music, however. So with Spotify being by far the most popular platform for online audio, it stands to reason that a lot of those people they're checking out the music will realize that, oh, they have podcasts. Now I have a very easy way to listen to podcasts that I maybe didn't before, because I'm an Android user. So if your podcast is not already on Spotify, get it there immediately. Spotify is growing in popularity. In terms of podcast downloads as well. It is by far the second most popular platform in terms of podcast downloads, so do not shoot yourself in the foot and get your podcast on Spotify. Immediately, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to check out this actual infinite dial report, I will have a link to it in the show notes because there is some interesting data in terms of social media. So you might want to check that out as well, because that could be beneficial for your business, including the fact that Facebook is no longer listed as the most used social media platform. So to find out what that is, check out that infinite dial report by going to podcasting for coaches. com, click on the episodes tab in the main menu and go to episode number 101. Okay, if you do not care about the giveaway stuff, you can shut the episode off here. And I will see you back here next week where I'm going to have an awesome interview for you. If you do care, if you listen to Episode 100. And you want to know who the podcast giveaway winners are. I'm going to go through that right now. And I will say that the podcast giveaway winners are no one. I hope you know by now that I am always extremely authentic with you. And I am very real with you. And I will say that this giveaway was a complete dud, I had not one single person actually participate in the giveaway. And I think I know why there was a pretty high barrier to entry because I was asking for people to do something outside of the podcast on a social media app that not everybody uses or to record video content. And that's a really, really big ask. So I do totally get that. If you want one of those prizes that I mentioned in the giveaway last week, which if you don't know what those are, make sure you go check out that episode. Just email me info at podcasting for coaches calm, and the first few people who email me We'll get one of the prizes until they're all gone. We're just gonna do this. super short and simple. I want to make sure that people are getting access to this that do regardless of what social media platform they use, if they're comfortable with video, if they can record video, any of those things. Now, I did have two different people ask me why I didn't just do the giveaway, where the entry for it was to leave a review for the podcast. I had one person actually asked me because they don't use Instagram. And they wanted to know if they could just do that instead. And then I had another person who was interested in doing a giveaway for her show. And she was wondering why I didn't ask that because she's considering doing that for her show. So I will just give a quick note here, that me doing a giveaway and having one of the tasks be to leave a review for this podcast, particularly on Apple podcasts because that's one of the easiest places for people to leave reviews is not technically against Apple's policy. It's not explicitly stated anywhere. However, it is explicitly stated in their terms in Section C, that you as the user, quote, may not use the services to post, modify or remove a rating or review in exchange for any kind of compensation or incentive. So if you're planning on doing a giveaway for your podcast, and you're going to ask people to leave reviews, technically, you're not in the wrong there, but they will be if they actually Do it and they could get their account suspended because they are violating Apple's Terms of Service. Alright, that's gonna wrap up this episode. I will see you back here next week, where I'm actually gonna have a little bit of a different episode for you. I've got a podcast marketing guru coming on to share a case study. Alright, thank you so much, and I will see you next week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches calm and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcasts that you create and put out into the world.