Podfacts
By Cliff Dumas
Everything Podcasts’ Podfacts are impressive. Podcasts actually predate the internet. They go back to the 1980s and were initially called ‘audio blogging.’ Similar to early bloggers, this was a way for anybody to share their experiences and thoughts with other people. However, due to a lack of means to distribute the recordings, it took another 20 years before the genre took off.
In the early 2000s with the rise in popularity of portable audio devices such as the iPod, the concept of transferring these ‘audio blogs’ to an audio player as an MP3 file became mainstream.
By 2003 people were able to download audio blogs to their iPod and journalist Ben Hammersley coined the term ‘podcasting,’ hence the word ‘pod’ in podcasting.
In 2005 Apple officially added podcasting to its iTunes Music Library. In 2005 during an onstage interview at D3, Steve Jobs demonstrated how anybody could create a podcast using their Mac and share with the world.
Since 2005, more than 700,000 podcasts have been created, with over 30 million episodes of content, most of them for free.
Incredibly, about a third of those episodes have been created since June of 2018. Here is a snapshot of where podcasting is today:
Podcast listening split between men and women.
According to The Infinite Dial Survey (links below) women listen to 7.2 podcasts per week. Men listen to 6.8.
U.S. Podcast Listeners
55% (155 million) of the US population has listened to a podcast in the last month.
36% of men
29% of women
Listened in the last month
37% (104 million) listened to a podcast in the last month – up from 32% in 2019
US Demographic
Age 12-34 (48%)
Age 35-54 (32%)
Age 55+ (20%)
Listened in the last week
24% (68 million) listen to podcasts weekly – up from 22% in 2019
Canadian Listeners
37% (11 million) of the Canadian population have listened to a podcast in the last month.
60% of men
40% of women
Listeners are engaged!
80% listen to all or most of each episode.
CDN Demographic
Age 18-34 (35%)
Age 35-54 (41%)
Age 55+ (24%)
Podcasts listened to
Weekly podcast listeners listen to 7 podcasts a week.
IAB’s (Interactive Advertising Bureau) podcast advertising revenue report finds brands now embrace podcasts as part of their annual planning, an industry expecting to hit 1 billion dollars in revenue in 2021.
