Monthly podcast consumers grew by 16% year-over-year, cresting 100 million Americans for the first time.
— The Infinite Dial 2020
The rise of podcasting is driven by multiple factors, including the smartphone, hardware, better creation tools, and found time — you can catch listeners when they’re jogging, cooking, or taking care of the baby. It is a low-cost and effective advertising and customer acquisition tool, and its popularity is also reflected by an estimated 750,000 podcasts globally.
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The podcasting audience has been growing steadily over time, with an estimated 155 million people who have ever listened to a podcast, 104 million who have listened to a podcast in the last month, and 68 million who have listened to a podcast within the last week.
Smartphones are the Most Common Podcast Device
People listen to podcasts on smartphones the most by far, while other mediums like computers and tablets have remained steady in their prevalence.
Home over Car (even pre-COVID)
Although there’s a preconception that commuting time is usually podcast time, the place where people listen to podcasts the most is at home, with the option “in a car/truck” following up in second place.
Potential for Growth
However, while active podcast listeners have been steadily increasing in number, it’s far from an exponential explosion. Currently, the percentage of active users listening to podcasts at least once a week is 24% of the U.S. population. This has led to debates over how to pull in the remaining 76% of the non-podcasting community, a question that was also a major theme of 2018’s Podcast Movement, the largest annual conference for the podcast industry. For this, we would need to look at who is currently listening.
We can see that podcast listeners (age 12+) have gradually grown more diverse since 2008, and while there’s still a little ways to go, the podcasting audience now falls close to reflecting the U.S.’s own demographic percentages.
This is likely due to the diversification of podcasters themselves, which would mean more diverse content to attract a wider range of listeners.
Half of Current Listeners are 34 or Younger
Podcast listeners are on the younger side, with almost half under 34 years of age. This may be due to tech-savviness and a willingness to try out new platforms and content mediums by younger listeners. This is good for those who want to cater to a younger audience. However, there are also reasons for the podcasting industry to start targeting older audiences:
As seen here, younger listeners are also the ones that are the fastest adopters of podcasts over time. However, while the audience aged 34 and above are smaller segments compared to the younger listeners, they are growing year over year and can embody a future growth opportunity. Potential problems to surmount for an older population, however, are technical troubles and an unwillingness to adapt to new media.
Current Podcast Listeners are an Affluent and Educated Audience
Overall, podcast listeners are 45% more likely to have a college degree.
They are also 45% more likely to earn more than $250K in annual income.
Current podcast listeners are young, affluent, and educated, and podcasting content often reflects that, with popular podcasting platforms like Apple’s “Top Charts” dominated by podcasts with deep dives on informative content and political analysis.
Edison Research had previously done a survey of non-listeners asking why they haven’t tried podcasts, and many said they weren’t any topics they would be interested in, or they were too long or too educational. Other prominent reasons included a general lack of understanding of where to find podcasts/podcast apps and how to listen to them. The podcasting industry should have a huge opportunity in more casual entertainment, which would be popular amongst all audiences. Celebrity news, podcast equivalents of shows like The Bachelor, and sports content are just a few of the types of content more people may enjoy listening to. Podcasts can also strive to market themselves to a broader user base, such as through mainstream social media channels, and explicitly include in their marketing where people can find the podcast, either by introducing an app where the podcast is hosted, or a link directly to the content on the web.
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