Expanding Universe: Podcasting Market Update

Podcasting - fad or changing media landscape? (Disclaimer: the Web 2.0 police require the use of "changing media landscape" and/or "mash-up" in all communications). As discussion about the growth of podcasting percolates in the industry, we thought it was a good time to release some statistics from the point of view of the world's largest manager of podcast feeds (ahem, over here, that's us). After just 18 months since enclosures started finding their way onto iPods everywhere, podcasting has already made a significant impact on the creation and consumption of content worldwide. Consider:

1. FeedBurner alone manages more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide (yep, we looked it up)
2. Podcasting is outpacing the speed of adoption of the last "most successful consumer product launch in history" (more on that in a minute)
3. Podcast directories are growing, and driving activity back to podcasters' originating Web sites. As we saw with text feeds, distribution begins as a mechanism to drive traffic back to the originating source and then evolves to become its own consumption medium

First, The Bigger Picture
At the time of this update, more than 168,000 publishers (bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers) call FeedBurner home. This translates to over a quarter of a million feeds under FeedBurner management, and over 60 million feed requests a day by an aggregate subscriber base in excess of 11 million. FeedBurner's global market stats continue to paint a picture of steady growth across all flavors of feeds - text, audio and video. Podcast feeds (those that contain a media enclosure) represent just under 20% of all FeedBurner feeds and this percentage is consistent with the more than 1,000 new feeds created every day at feedburner.com.

More Podcasts Than Radio Stations Worldwide
FeedBurner recently surpassed a major milestone of 44,000 podcast feeds under management which, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide. Since our last update on the topic, the creation of podcast feeds has averaged 15% growth month over month. You can get a sense for this growth by reviewing the chart below. Or, if you prefer a more active audio/visual experience, check out Feedstorm. Or, you can ignore both and just trust us.

People Are Tuning In
Podcast listenership may have a long way to go before catching up to the U.S. radio audience, but while radio audience is declining, podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month. Today, there are more than 1.6 million aggregate subscribers to FeedBurner-managed podcasts, and this number has more than doubled in the past six months. Since we recently started tracking podcast downloads within feeds, we've also seen the ratio of downloads to subscribers average 2:1, suggesting a significant secondary market for podcast listenership beyond just the feed's subscribers. (For more on this, see "Uncommon Uses" below.)

Audience size runs the gamut. Some podcasts have a very large audience, like NPR's On The Media from WNYC, New York Public Radio, with more than 16,000 loyal subscribers (and as many as 40,000 who download media right from the Web site). Others are more personal podcasts created to keep friends and family up to date. While iTunes is the clear favorite for podcast subscribers, a healthy 43% of the market listens (or watches) their favorite podcasts using other applications. That said, the two most significant jumps in podcast circulation in the past 18 months can both be tied to iTunes: In July, when iTunes 4.9 launched with podcasting support, and the end of last year, when millions of people unwrapped an iPod (Apple sold 14 million iPods in Q4 last year).

Success, As Defined by History
Another promising indicator of the success of podcasting is its comparison to another media technology shift that received a lot of hype in its early days: The DVD. Back in 2000, the DVD format, just 3 years old at the time, was declared the most successful product launch in consumer electronics history, outselling the VCR five to one. Using these statistics as a benchmark, in less than two years, the number of podcasts available online is tenfold that of DVD titles in nearly half the time. In fact, at the 18-month mark for DVDs, there were fewer than 3,000 DVD titles available, and an install base of under 1.5m.

Is it fair to compare podcasting to the DVD? After all, DVD production is an expensive technology, developed to aid in the distribution of movies. Podcasts can be about anything, created by anyone, and can cost next to nothing to produce. But that's part of the point: Advances in technology, the wide availability of audio creation tools, ease of podcast configuration and distribution using services like SmartCast, aided by a passionate group of content creators have helped to fuel this growth. With the media landscape shifting from a centrally managed business to one in which anyone can be a content producer, podcasting demonstrates just how far we've come in a short five years.

One DVD Site Makes the Transition to New Media
Geoff Kleinman is in perhaps the best position to observe this transition. As DVDs and DVD players were first gaining traction in the market, Geoff launched DVD Talk, an online resource to help people decide what to watch on DVD. The site includes detailed reviews, columns and DVD Talk Radio, a weekly podcast with periodic interviews with Academy Award winning directors, comedians and other entertainment-related folk. Today, as a default feed on MyYahoo!, there are more than 67,000 subscribers to the DVD Talk feed, a number that is quickly gaining on the 90,000 subscribers to the online magazine's weekly email newsletter. DVD Talk is averaging about 15 million page views per month and the DVD Talk Radio podcast reaches over 1,500 listeners per week.

Uncommon Uses
Looking beyond simple subscriber numbers, FeedBurner's StandardStats service reveals "Uncommon Uses," which are often surprising details about podcast consumption that have been completely overlooked in the podcast adoption discussion. A growing number of sites are resyndicating podcast feed content, going far beyond what we traditionally think of as a subscriber. For DVD Talk Radio, this insight reveals a number of podcast directories generating a sizable amount of traffic on behalf of the DVD Talk feed (see here and here for two examples). One directory alone generated over 6,000 views of DVD Talk Radio episodes, and the directories are averaging a click-through rate back to the DVD Talk Radio Web site of .8%.

Is this the industry norm? Not yet. (That's why we call them uncommon uses.) But it illustrates how the viral nature of distributed media can significantly expand a potential market - and as the number of popular podcasts hosted through FeedBurner continues to increase, it's a pattern that is often repeated.

Podcast Content to Suit a Range of Interests
As you might expect, FeedBurner's 47,000+ podcasts cover every possible subject. In addition to the legion of vibrant independent podcasters, mainstream sites like Newsweek On Air, Sound Opinions, the world's only broadcast rock and roll talk show and Australia's multilingual broadcaster SBS Corporation are also leveraging the magic of FeedBurner's SmartCast service to optimize their content for distribution far and wide (and when we say "the magic of FeedBurner's SmartCast service", we mean magic not as in "how did they do that" but as in "oooooh, pretty", you know, like fireworks). Accident Hash, a Boston-based show hosted by C.C. Chapman strives to give a voice to independent artists around the globe. And even traditional marketers are diving in, uncovering creative ways to promote their feeds and drive subscribers to new audio content. For example, Castrol SYNTEC recently launched a series of podcasts to give listeners insights on racing, cars & music, and of course, motor oil! Keeping with the automotive theme, Matt Borland - the pit crew chief for the No. 12 Alltel Dodge racing team - uses a weekly podcast to connect with fans by providing exclusive insider recaps of each NASCAR Cup Series race, commentary on NASCAR's hot topics, emerging trends in the sport and a preview of the upcoming races.

Finding and subscribing to podcasts is getting easier too. More and more directories are aggregating and categorizing podcast feeds. Several directories including PodNova and Podfeed offer FeedBurner-specific ranking based on those podcasters who have made their subscriber statistics public. (FeedBurner podcasters can make sure they are listed by activating the Awareness API within the "Publicize" tab).

First Walk, Then Run
While all of this rapid adoption is exciting, it's clear that we are still in the early stages of podcast's emergence as a sustainable medium. As the audience continues to grow - and the past 18 months are a reasonable basis for some predictions - we expect to see more hockey-stick-like charts and continued fragmentation in the consumption of the content. In the new world, media is transformed from a "hits" business, in which there are very few content producers with millions of readers/listeners/viewers and no other participants, to a long tail of millions of content producers with reader/listener/viewer numbers ranging anywhere between zero and millions. Podcasting appears to be set to follow this pattern.

Though we're certain all of our podcasters do it for love, we know that many will want to find ways to make money from their hard work. For them, we have good news. Later this year, we will be expanding the FeedBurner Ad Network to include advertising opportunities for rich media feed publishers, with specific programs that will embrace this growing medium and provide it with the tools to integrate podcasting into publishers' digital media strategies for audience measurement and monetization.

Before the end of the year, FeedBurner will likely manage well over 100,000 podcasts representing upwards of 5 million subscribers. The more feeds that run through FeedBurner, the more visibility we have into the shifting dynamics of content consumption, and the more insight we'll give publishers about their content. In the meantime, while the audience continues to grow, podcasters will continue to require tools that make the management, measurement, mashing up and delivery of their content even easier. Having now satisfied the Web 2.0 police (we wedged "mash-up" in there at the last minute), we'll now get back to delivering the podcasts.