EchoDitto Blog

Six Million Stories

posted by Tim Jones
April 4, 2005 - 9:25am

Yesterday, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a report on podcasting. Their numbers are a little surprising:

  • 22,000,000 Americans own iPods (or other MP3 players), and 6,000,000 Americans use them to listen to podcasts or internet radio broadcasts. (So more Americans listen to podcasts than own reptiles.)
  • Nearly half of those who own iPods/MP3 players between the ages of 18-28 have downloaded podcasts.

Read the whole thing for details, but the main take-away is that the numbers seem to back up the hype. (!!)

Pew has no hard data on how often people listen or what kind of material they listen to. But I'll add some rough data of our own to the mix: Examining the EchoRadio Apache logs reveals that only about a third of our MP3 downloads are made by podcast-aggregators like Doppler or iPodder. The majority of downloads are made by web browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox.

I'm no statistician, but this suggests to me that podcast-aggregator software is still too immature to have been widely adopted. Instead, most podcast listeners are either copying podcasts onto their iPod manually or- more likely IMHO- just listening from their computers, iPod-free.

So podcasting is big, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Basically, internet radio is about to grow up and kick ass.

If you want to hop on the trend, yesterday's Washington Post has a good article: Create Your Own Podcasts

Tim Jones's blog
( categories: Gadgets | Radio | Technology )

Hmm. Those numbers seem suspect, as many of the people over at engadget have thought.

Basically, the iPod/mp3 player ownership breakout of the survey has an error margin of 7.5% to begin with. That's very high. Combined with some strange results, such as the fact that 28% of those who using dialup (vs 33% of those with broadband) said that they had downloaded a podcast, and things seem even more suspect. Almost a third of people with mp3 players who have dialup internet access are downloading timeshifted radio programs? That seems very high, especially for a technology that came into its own *last year*.

Furthermore, with a 7.5% margin of error for the ipod owning group alone, breaking down the sample into the group of ipod owners between 18-28 reduces your sample size from 208 people to 40 people. So of those 40 people who own iPods and are between 18-28, 20 of them said "yes" to the podcasting question. I took statistics too long ago to do the math on that group, but I'd humbly suggest asking 40 people seems too small a survey size.

When you look at the podcast question they asked, things get a little more clear: "Have you ever downloaded a podcast or internet radio program so you could listen to it on your digital audio player at a later time?" It's a confusing question for most people...I'm sure out of the four members of my family with mp3 players, only one would've understood what this question was referring to.

I'd have been more confident in the survey if they had asked the group of 208 people (still too small a sample for my liking) if they

a) knew what podcasting was
b) explained it further for those who did not
c) asked if users had downloaded a time-shifted radio program and saved it to their mp3 device

If 6 million Americans are podcasting right now, I'd be shocked. Let's remember, TiVo just broke the 3 million subscriber mark...and "timeshifting" television has been around since the days of the betamax. I also recall that by late October, Apple had "only" sold 6 million iPods. That's a hell of a lot of iPods. But since they have over 90% of the market, I seriously doubt that every iPod owner is podcasting...

Submitted by Reed Wiedower on April 4, 2005 - 12:07pm.

I agree with Reed that this survey seems to have some major methodology problems, mostly in terms of the assumptions it makes about people's understanding of this brand-new vocabulary. I mean, 62% of internet users don't even know what a blog is, and yet somehow podcasting is okay to use as a term in a question--"Have you ever downloaded a podcast?" It just seems like common sense to preface that question with "Do you know what a podcast is?"

Submitted by Emily on April 4, 2005 - 12:45pm.

You make some good points. The numbers are still promising, considering this is the first serious nationwide study that's been done on this. But I think you're right that there's a lot more research to be done.

I don't buy your specific concerns about mp3-player-ownership numbers, though. MacWorld claims 36.8 million mp3 players were sold worldwide in 2004 alone, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that there'd be 22 million in America.

Submitted by Tim Jones on April 4, 2005 - 1:54pm.

Pew is already walking back on their statement. If the poll director herself doesn't believe the 6 million number, as this person points out, why should we believe in their methodology at all?

Submitted by Reed on April 5, 2005 - 11:04am.

Wow- yes, this does indeed shake my confidence in Pew. wtf?
Thanks for pointing out the links.

Submitted by Tim Jones on April 5, 2005 - 8:03pm.