Podcasting on the Rise

Here's our latest look at some aggregate feed metrics, as measured by us. FeedBurner now manages approximately 60,000 feeds, just over 6,000 of which are podcasts. The chart below details the growth since we launched our SmartCast service toward the end of last year.

It took us nine weeks to manage our first thousand podcasts, and we added our most recent thousand podcasts in under a month. As you can see, the rate of growth changes in bursts. We added about 800 podcasts per month initially, then 1000 a month, and now we're adding about 1400 a month.

Amazingly, across the 6,000 podcasts, we have created a total of 49,704 enclosures. At first glance, that number sounded awfully high to us, but further investigation bears out that at this early adopter stage, podcasters are jumping in and generally sticking with it.

A quick note. Astute observers will note that our numbers on the chart above and those in our previous report don't foot precisely for January. When a feed is run through FeedBurner that later becomes a podcast feed, that podcast feed gets marked as the date it first ran through us (similarly, if a podcast feed started running through us in January and then stopped using FeedBurner, that would result in January's number being reduced by one).

Subscriber Growth

Just as interesting, podcasts managed by FeedBurner have an average of 33 subscribers, up from an average of 15 subscribers in February. If you discount the feeds with less than 5 subscribers, the average number of subscribers per podcast is 65.

In February, we managed 20 podcasts with over 100 subscribers and hundreds of podcasts with more than 10 subscribers. Now we manage about 20 podcasts with over 1000 subscribers and hundreds of podcasts with more than 100 subscribers. As we noted in our first podcasting report in February, a typical "long tail" is developing. Granted, these are still very small numbers we are talking about when contrasted with other media, but considering the wealth of additional podcasting tools and services about to come to market, both podcast production and subscription will undoubtedly become easier. So, an order of magnitude leap in attention in just a few months is exciting.

What portion of the world's active podcasts does FeedBurner manage? Well, that's hardly for us to say, but we like the number "lots of them"

Related Statistics

iPodder, iPodderX and Doppler are now in the top 25 feed clients we track, as measured by total daily FeedBurner circulation. In our first report, these clients had just cracked the top 50. Obviously, some of the most popular desktop clients have become podcatchers as well, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and others. In that light, it's interesting to see that the specialty clients continue to experience healthy growth.

Ten percent of all our podcasts (that would be about 600 for those of you keeping score at home) are taking advantage of the Yahoo Media RSS support that we now provide as an integrated SmartCast service.

We look forward to writing similar reports on video blogging and the rise of the FireANT aggregator this fall.