Changing tastes for podcasts

Forrester’s report on podcast usage in the US shows some interesting trends, neatly summarised on  Charlene Li’s blog. A summary of some of the most interesting follows:

  • 1% of US online households are using podcasts at the moment (not many, but early days, folks)
  • Most popular is existing professionally produced content from radio station or online shows.
  • Newspaper brand content is only marginally more popular than consumer generated content.
  • Forrester projects growth to 2010 when it expects a third of MP3-player owners in the US to be listening to podcasts (12.3 million households).

Li’s advice to brands is not rush out to create expensive content for podcasts, but to adapt existing content where it lends itself well to the medium (unless they want to get kudos for looking really innovative).

My personal experience from talking to a lot of people about social media recently is while a lot of people have iPods (usually, and a smattering of other players), most have never looked at the podcast section on iTunes.

UK newspapers and most importantly the BBC are promoting podcasts heavily in the UK. My gut feel is that this may lead to higher podcast adoption in the UK than the US.

A quick look at the UK top 20 podcasts on iTunes shows (see illustration below) BBC, Ricky Gervais and other professional content dominating (Nike in there with a brandcasting effort by he way), whereas earlier this year I would say it looked about 50:50 consumer-generated / professional content.

The change probably reflects more formally produced content becoming available as well as the adoption cycle reaching an early majority phase (innovators in the old Moore model are more likely to be open to amateur efforts and stick less closely to familar brands).

Itunes_top_20

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