Podcasts now outnumber radio stations. So how do the apples measure up to the oranges?
The Silicon Republic reports that podcasts are overtaking radio stations. I believe in the power of the podcast and love to shout ‘huzzah’ as well as the next guy, but folks… seriously. Podcasting has not yet surpassed radio. Not by a longshot. Podcasting has not, as some blogs are beginning to report, achieved in two years what radio took 100 years to reach.
Compare if you will:
- A podcast is a single program, maybe a half-hour’s worth. The program may be daily, but odds are it’s weekly or biweekly.
- A radio station is at least 18 hours or so of programming, each day, every day.
So for every station we would need 252 weekly programs to be the equivilant. Assuming all 38000 podcasters are active and haven’t faded, that only puts us the equivilant of 150 statio (about number of Jazz stations in the US). But I guess ‘Podcasting now outnumbers Jazz stations’ isn’t quite as catchy when trying to hook a media outlet into running your press release.
Compare also:
- A recent study puts the podcast audience around 3 million people downloading at least one podcast a week. That’s worldwide.
- In the United States alone, there’s about 6 million people who tune in to a classical music station at least once a day. 94% of Americans listen to the radio at least once a week for an average listening time of 20hrs.
Now - podcasting is growing at a phenomenal rate. But it’s not going to surpass the radio any time soon. Not when almost a third of the folks in North America - never mind the rest of the world - do not have an internet connection or a computer.
