More people than ever are listening to podcasts, says survey

*Por Sarah Scire

News from the podcast industry hasn’t been very encouraging for some time. There were layoffs and a lack of advertising. Podcast publishers “reorientando” e “restructuring”. A popular metric, the number of downloads, fell for even the biggest programs after Apple changed how it calculates it.

A new report, however, presents good news for podcasts in fundamental media habits. According to the annual Infinite Dial survey, released on March 28, more Americans are listening to podcasts regularly than ever before.

Edison Research interviewed 1,086 U.S. teens and adults for the report. The results showed that 67% of people in the US (aged 12 and over) have listened to a podcast, 47% have listened in the last month, and 34% have listened in the last week. Here is the full research (PDF – 5 MB, in English).

Pierre Bouvard, director of insights of Cumulus Media, said podcasts are no longer “a niche platform without scale” in a publication for marketers. “O [setor de] Podcasting deserves a bigger role in media plans, as opposed to ‘test and learn’ experiential purchases.”, writes Bouvard. Cumulus Media is listed as a support provider for the report, along with Audacy and SiriusXM.

The percentages are even higher when looking at younger Americans. The report showed that 59% of people under 35 and 55% of people under 54 listen to podcasts at least once a month.

The difference in podcast consumption between men and women has narrowed. This year, 45% of women and 48% of men reported listening to a podcast in the last month. Women who listen to podcasts weekly listen, on average, to 2 more episodes per week than men. The 2023 report showed that 7% more men listened weekly than women.

The survey also showed that ownership of smart speakers, such as Amazon’s Alexa, may have peaked. Slightly fewer (34%) reported owning a smart speaker than the previous year, although nearly half of those who own smart speakers said they owned 3 or more of them.

*Sarah Scire is a deputy editor at Nieman Lab. Previously, she worked at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and New York Times.

Text translated by Aline Marcolino. Read the original in English.

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