TORONTO – Podcasts are a growth industry right now.
Media companies and brands of all sorts – and certainly now all broadcasters – are pushing podcasts as hard as they can. Broadscasters’ TV stars and radio talent are expanding their reach further into consumers’ lives and new research shows this sort of content is attracting savvy advertisers looking for a place to push their wares in a media world which can be hostile to traditional ad campaigns.
Paid music streaming services, for example, seem to be doing to music what Netflix did to movies and TV (look ma, no ads), and there are even fewer places to advertise to affluent consumers who want their content on-demand.
So, findings from The Canadian Podcast Listener 2019 show podcasts can help advertisers unlock this attractive audience. “On-demand consumers have a marked affinity with podcasts, with weekly users of digital on-demand media indexing well above traditional media for being monthly podcast listeners,” reads the research announced this week. Like paid audio/video streaming services, podcasts free consumers to choose the content they find most engaging and when they want to engage. However, it’s often only podcasts which open the door for advertisers to reach the consumer when they are so deeply engaged.
Co-published by Audience Insights and Ulster Media, with support from The Podcast Exchange (TPX), results from The Canadian Podcast Listener Study 2019 is based on online surveys using a market representative sample of more than 4,500 Canadian adults from Maru Voice Canada.
Nearly 11 million Canadian adults (37% of the 18+ population) have listened to podcasts in the past year. More than 13 million (45%) have listened at some point, says the research – which adds that with 4% of audio consumption going to podcasts, that translates to a $60 million potential ad market right now.
Given we’re still in podcasting’s infancy, that number will only grow. The report estimates podcast revenue in the U.S. in 2019 will come in at US$697 million, growing to over US$1 billion by 2021.
And as with most media, the “power” users are driving consumption. “The 37% of weekly podcast listeners who are Power Listeners account for three-quarters of the total weekly podcast hours,” says the report.
Podcast listeners also consume all sorts of other media and are rather likely to be an affulent audience.
