Click here to view the embedded video.

Edison Research has made available this year’s edition of The Current State of Podcasting, a study of American podcast consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. The 2010 report is Edison’s fifth annual study and was unveiled earlier this fall at Blogworld in Las Vegas, and combined information from the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet & Multimedia series, along with previously released data from The American Youth Study 2010 and the Edison/ADM Consumer Attitudes to Podcast Advertising study, also from 2010.

Principal findings of the study included:

• The percentage of Americans who have ever watched or listened to a podcast is 45%, up from 43% one year ago. This equates to approximately 70 million Americans 12+.
• The podcast audience has migrated from being predominantly “early adopters” to more closely resembling mainstream media consumers.
• Podcast consumers index very highly for social networking behaviors.
• Two-thirds of podcast consumers have listened to digital audio files in their vehicles by connecting an iPod or other MP3 player to their car audio system.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the growing numbers of smartphone [iPhone, Android, etc.] users, podcasts are being consumed primarily at the computer, and less frequently than last year via the mobile device or “dedicated media player” like the iPod or Zune.

Not so surprisingly, young [12-24] podcast consumers are listening to Pandora rather than AM/FM radio, watch and listen to podcasts on demand rather than by subscription/download, and discover new podcast content via social networks and in the iTunes podcast directory.

The Blogworld presentation examined “not only how podcasting has changed over the past five years, but also how those changes have created new opportunities for new media content producers.” The presentation is approximately 60 minutes long, and is available here; the presentation slides alone are at this link.

Podcast fans are a fantastic audience for advertisers to reach, according to a new report from Edison Research and the Association for Downloadable Media (ADM).

Podcast fans are well off financially, they pay attention to ads in podcasts, they’re hard to reach with traditional advertising and they are 6 times as likely to “enjoy” the ads in podcasts as consumers of traditional media.

In other words – people that can afford to turn away from “interruption” style advertising are doing so, and opt-in podcasts are one of the few ways to connect with them.

Highlights of the Podcast Consumer Attitudes study include:

• Podcast fans are significantly more affluent than general population.
• Podcast fans are rapidly turning away from traditional media and “interruption” advertising models.
• 37% of video podcast users and 31% of audio podcast users say they *enjoy* advertising in podcasts. By comparison, only 6% say same of TV and radio.
• Podcasts confer on their advertisers and sponsors a “halo effect; podcast fans give props to the advertiser for sponsoring a show they like.
• Over 70% of active podcast listeners are receptive to sponsorship messages in podcasts.

If further research confirms the findings of this survey, podcast fans could prove to be the ultimate audience for many advertisers.

Check out the detail below and let me know what you think. Is it time for advertisers to take another look at podcasts?

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video, Tom Webster, VP of Strategy and Marketing for Edison Research, presents of the recently completed ADM study of Podcast Consumers Attitudes.

Other highlights of the research:

• One in five active podcast consumers are actively interested in host-read sponsorship messages. Survey respondents believe that podcast hosts/creators are actual users of the goods and services of their sponsors.
• Nearly 4/5 of the survey interviewees listen to podcasts every week, but are not as reachable by other “regular” mass media.
• Podcast fans say it is not just important to be able to “time-shift” their podcast and other media consumption; nearly equally important is the ability to get unique shows [not available outside of podcast medium].
• 90% of those surveyed prefer advertising supported shows vs. ad-free paid subscriptions.
• 3/4 of the respondents use iTunes to find and subscribe and 66% have been listening/watching podcasts for 2 years or more

According to Webster, This study is a “self-selected sample of active podcast consumers. The story is not that they represent the mainstream — it’s that they don’t represent the mainstream, are turning away from traditional media, but are still very receptive to podcast advertising. They aren’t just ‘ad-haters’.”

The Podcast Consumer Attitudes study is the first of a series of studies that will look at consumer attitudes and behavior concerning online video and audio, social media and Twitter.

Image: Lock, stock and 2 smoking barrels!!

If you’ve ever wondered why iPods and portable media players have been such a huge hit, or why podcasting and Internet radio are as popular as they are, this video has the answers.

Narrated by Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker, Before The Music Dies is an unsettling look at today’s popular music industry.

It features interviews and performances by Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Branford Marsalis – and even more importantly, musicians and other people in the music industry that you probably have never heard of.

Before The Music Dies filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen walked away from traditional Hollywood distribution to instead pursue a large-scale grassroots release with B-Side Entertainment. Since its release in November 2006, the film has screened over 200 times in over 130 North American markets with hundreds of additional events anticipated worldwide during 2007.

The entire film is embedded above – and what’s amazing about this film is that you can jump to anywhere in the movie and you’re going to find something compelling.

You can find out more about Before The Music Dies at the film’s site.

Are Twitter users anti-social?

Last week, Internet marketing blog HubSpot released their second State of the Twittersphere report (pdf).

According to HubSpot’s report:

• 79.79% Twitter users fail to provide a homepage URL
• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

So – more than half of all Twitter users have done nothing more than lurk at the site, and three-fourths of all Twitter users aren’t even trying to be social.

A lot of people are going to take a look at these numbers and conclude that Twitter users are anti-social. That’s a mistake, though, because it confuses Twitter accounts with actual users of the site.

It’s clear that Twitter hype has led a lot of people to sign up for the site to check it out. Many people also have multiple identities on Twitter in order to “stake claim” on those identities. This no different than the way people buy many more domain names than they actually use.

Trying to understand Twitter based on unused accounts makes as much sense as trying to understand the Web based on all the millions of unused domain names.

HubSpot’s statistics are interesting – but their stats would be a lot more useful if they focused on people that actually actively use the site.

via TwistImage

Online measurement company ComScore today released findings from its April 2009 “Video Metrix” data. Internet users viewed 16.8 billion online videos during that month, representing an increase of 16 percent versus March. A significant increase in video viewing at YouTube contributed to the month’s gains.

In April, Google Sites, whose online video properties include YouTube, once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with 6.8 billion videos viewed (equating to 40.7 percent online video market share), a 15-percent increase versus March. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.

Fox Interactive Media, parent of social networking site MySpace, ranked a rather distant second with 513 million videos viewed, or 3.1 percent online video market share. Hulu.com followed in third place with 397 million videos viewed (2.4 percent market share), ahead of next-ranked Yahoo! Sites, with 355 million videos viewed (2.1 percent).

ComScore also reported that, across all the online video sites being tracked, nearly 152 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 111 videos per viewer in April. Google Sites (again, the parent of YouTube), reached an all-time high of 107.9 million video viewers during the month. Fox Interactive Media (owner of MySpace) ranked second with 58.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (45.4 million) and Hulu (40.1 million).

Other notable findings from ComScore’s April 2009 report include:

• 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 385 minutes of video, or 6.4 hours.
• 107.1 million viewers watched 6.8 billion videos on YouTube.com (that averages out to 63.5 videos per viewer).
• 49 million viewers watched 387 million videos on MySpace.com (7.9 videos per viewer).
• Hulu accounted for only 2.4 percent of videos viewed, but made up 4.2 percent of all minutes spent watching online video.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

American television consumption is on the rise, on every platform available, according to a new report from The Nielsen Company. Monthly time spent watching video on the Internet grew especially quickly, up over 50 percent since the first quarter of last year.

Nielsen’s quarterly “Three Screen Report” looks at Americans’ media consumption habits, and this latest edition reveals that the average American watches a staggering 153 hours of TV every month at home, a 1.2% increase from last year.

The Internet video-watching numbers are dwarfed in comparison: the 131 million Americans who do watch video on the Internet watch an average of only about three hours of video online each month (both at home and at work.) However, this figure is still significantly higher than the average hour and 57 minutes people spent watching Internet video each month, during the same time period last year.

The 13.4 million Americans who watch video on mobile phones watch on average about 3 ½ hours of mobile video each month, but figures for mobile video watching were not tracked at this time last year, so one can’t examine how and whether that figure is greater than during the same time in 2008.

Neilsen credits “strong brand marketing” and big news events like the Super Bowl and the Presidential Inauguration with the strong growth in online video-watching during the first-quarter of 2009. They forecast continued growth in Internet video audiences, as more people get broadband Internet connections and computer hardware with better video-streaming capabilities.

The report also forecasts growth in mobile video consumption, with more and better mobile content available, and the rise of the mobile web as a viewing option. A more detailed explanation of Neilsen’s “Three Screen Report” can be found here.

Tom Webster of Edison Research has a thought-provoking piece on the future of podcasting.

At his blog, The Infinite Dial, Webster qualifies the cup-is-half-empty findings of the Zenith Optimedia report (as detailed by eMarketer). To review, Zenith sees the future of podcasting as rosy and profitable only for the lucky few, and podcasting ad revenue will remain a small piece of the total online advertising pie.

Webster, on the other hand, points out (with some fun “Terminator” references) that an alternate future is possible for podcasting. He says that podcasting today, in his view, falls into the niche, “indie” camp, or into the big bin of repurposed content from “mainstream producers.” Most niche content, being niche, won’t attract a huge audience (or huge revenues). Repurposed old-media content won’t yield new audiences or drive income growth, in Webster’s view.

So, how to make the best use of “unique attributes of the [podcast] medium” and spark growth in both the audience size and the market for downloadable media? Webster says to think PODCASTING:

P: Portable. More than two-thirds of podcast consumers continue to report listening more to podcasts tethered to their computer (where they compete with everything) than they do on portable devices–where new listening opportunities for broadcast content abound. Location-specific, activity-specific and context-specific content opens up all kinds of creative programming and revenue opportunities.

O: Original. Content that you can’t get anywhere else, like the unaired “fourth hour” of your morning show, local music features, or local public affairs programming–basically, anything you can think of that won’t fly as broadcast, mass-appeal content that nevertheless has a place with passionate sub-groups of your audience.

D: Discrete. Think “Song,” not necessarily “Show.” Bite-sized, easily digestible content chunks allow the podcast listener/viewer to create their own ‘playlist’ of content. I rarely miss Jon Gordon’s “Future Tense” or my friend Chris MacDonald’s IndieFeed podcasts because they are both around five minutes long, and I can easily stick them in the same playlist for my morning run.

C: Compelling. Goes without saying.

ASTING: I got nothin’. OK, you really only need to tackle the first four.

The suggestions are sensible, and content producers should take many of these ideas to heart. But the arguments overlook or exclude some of the best things about podcasting as the medium stands today.

For example, “This American Life” is, essentially, just a podcast edition of its weekly public radio program. But while the radio audience for the show has levelled at (a respectable) 1.8 million, the podcast of the show has gained a half a milliion listeners who otherwise would not be listening to the show. And the show ignores the “bite size” caveat, weighing in at an hour per episode.

What do you see as the podcasting “success stories” of today? What “rules” would you lay down to assure that the downloadable media industry thrives and grows?

Podcast advertising revenue is growing, but not as quickly as for other online media. An article today from eMarketer says that by 2011, podcast ad spending will grow to $43 million — but that amount comes to “less than 0.2% of [media services firm] ZenithOptimedia‘s projection for the total online advertising space.”

ZenithOptimedia, a communications strategy company, forecasts that $28 million will be spent on podcast advertising in the United States this year. They expect it to grow at an increasing rate over the next several years. But the podcast advertising industry will not grow as quickly as, or to the magnitude of, other online media like paid search, display ads, or Internet radio.

Compared with terrestrial radio (which is losing ad money, year-to-year) with a forecast $14 billion in revenue, eMarketer says, “The appetite for podcasts is fairly light.”

“Much like blogging, podcasting is proving to be profitable to those who have premium content, but less so to everyday citizens who use the medium to reach long-tail audiences,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst in the article.

But should you consider this report bad news for podcasters, or the downloadable media industry?

And are the forecast $28 million in ad revenues this year going to prove elusive to “everyday citizens,” as eMarketer’s Verna suggests?

Edison Research says, in their latest report, “The Infinite Dial, 2009,” that the US podcast audience has grown by 22% since last year, expanding from 18% of all Americans in 2008 to 22% in 2009.

Combine steady, unrelenting audience growth with steady increases in advertising revenue, and, from our perspective, the future for the podcast industry looks pretty promising. Attention to traditional media is eroding, and attention to online media is growing. If you create online content, or work with folks who do, that’s good news.

The podcasting piece of the online ad revenue pie is small, but the pie (and the size of our “slice”) gets bigger each year. Even for those “everyday citizens” Verna talks about.

Maybe we are suffering from irrational exhuberance, but we see this steady growth as a really good thing.

What do you think?

The Association for Downloadable Media and Edison Research are pairing up to present a free online Webcast covering the latest reasearch on the audience for podcasts.

Tom Webster from Edison Research will present The Podcast Consumer Revealed – 2009, on May 21, 2009, at 1:00 EST. In the Webcast, Webster will discuss the fourth iteration of Edison’s podcast research. The event is free, but requires pre-registration at this link.

Edison’s latest report offers some good news for podcasters, including proof of podcasting’s steady growth:

• Awareness of podcasting has increased from 37% to 43%; and
• The percentage of Americans who have ever listened to an audio podcast has grown to 22%.

“If you are in the business of creating downloadable media, this is key, significant research that you won’t want to miss,” says Webster, “This report and webcast will look at demographics and usage, key audience behaviors, content preferences, and attitudes towards advertising and sponsorships.”

The webcast will last one hour and will include time for your questions. Participants will also be able to download the presentation prior to its wider public release.

Details on the webcast are available at http://www.downloadablemedia.org.

Image: Ronan_tlv

Satellite radio network Sirius XM Radio released grim first-quarter results today, with a drop in both subscribers and revenues.

Sirius has recently created a new service that can stream radio content via Apple devices like the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but that innovation may be too little, too late, to staunch the hemorrhage of customers.

In a world where free content proliferates in the form of free Internet radio and free podcasts, is (paid) satellite radio content irrelevant?

The company, which resulted from the merger last of two competing satellite radio providers, had a decline of 404,000 subscribers from the previous reporting quarter. Many new subscribers to the radio service have historically come from new car purchases with built-in satellite receivers. With the slump in automotive sales, the company predicts a “noticeable hit” to subscription rolls over the next quarter as well.

Sirius also reported a loss of $236 million in the first quarter, or 7 cents a share, compared with last year’s first-quarter loss of $104 million. $186 million of the loss was related to stock issued to Liberty Media Group earlier in the year, as part of Liberty’s $530 million loan to Sirius, which in turn helped the satellite company stave off declaring bankruptcy.

Somehow, the company remains optimistic about the long-term outlook for satellite radio. Despite expected continued subscription losses, they have raised their forecast for 2009 adjusted income from $300 to $350 million, as a result of “cost-cutting measures.” Mel Karmazin, CEO of Sirius, also expects to meet a goal of over 20 million subscribers by the end of this year.

In an upbeat statement that flies in the face of the hard numbers and analysts’ assessments, Karmazin says that “satellite radio is now a cash flow growth story.”