780m+ Podcast episodes will be downloaded / streamed in Australia this year.
We’re already halfway there! It’ll be more in 2020, maybe even 900+ million?
780m is much more than I expected when I set out to estimate the podcast market size in Australia.
I’ll explain the “+” in a moment. 780 million is arguably conservative and deserves the “+”.
This isn’t data that’s just been released, it’s been out there for a while (May 2019) but seems no one thought it would be fun to see 780m+?
In Australia about 3.748 million people listened in the last week!
780/3.74 = 208, that’s the number of podcast episodes those 3.748 million Australian listeners need to download and listen to each year to catch my digits.
One thing to note — Australians listen to a significant amount of USA and UK shows. The market and population isn’t large enough here to compete en masse with those two in the far Western hemisphere, even if our time zone is significantly ahead of theirs. It doesn’t matter how early we get up in the morning!
The UK and USA have great production and marketing capabilities when it comes to media. That’s a given. And so much more of it.
Australian podcast data for individual shows covered in our trade outlets usually appears after a show has been downloaded over 1 million times.
And I highly doubt there’s even 200 Australian shows doing those numbers. I’d hazard a guess that The Teacher’s Pet is the only Australian podcast with a single episode that has over 1 million in Australia.
Happy to be proven wrong.
Either way, a BIG chunk of the Australian listening diet is from a land across an ocean (or two, or more).
How did I get 780+ million?
I found some listening data in The Infinate Dial (Edison AUS 2019) presentation and worked backwards.
But I needed a couple of extra bits.
1. The number of Australians that listened to a podcast in the last week?
Thats 15% (p.30) of Australia’s total population aged 12 years and older.
Using ABS data Australia’s approx total population 12 years and older is 21,005,871. Method in Appendix 1.
15% = 3,748,912 = Australians listening to a podcast each week.
***In the spreadsheet it’s rounded down to 3.71m total due to using only two decimal points in calculations.
2. WHY THE “+”????
“Four or Five” or “Six to Ten” was going to get messy so I took the lower number. Four, Six and Eleven for the graph.
And here’s the spreadsheet I made to calculated it.
Source: Google Sheets (view only, please leave comments below this article)
Thanks also to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the population data.
What to take away?
SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION.
SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION.
SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION.
Even if you were counting grains of sand that would be a whole lot of sand.
The cottage industry under the radar of mainstream media is certainly not that.
If it’s money the industry wants then saying 780 million to an ad agency or a in a presentation to someone is going to be a good start. Yet it won’t solve the revenue problem. That’ll have to come through some business model creativity and audience behavioural change.
If it’s growth in the medium you’d like, 780 million is a huge huge huge leap from 2003 (ZERO downloads in Australia) to 16 years later in little old half-way-through 2019.
If you’d just like a bigger number, try calculating how many minutes of podcast content we (Australians) listen to each year…
A very rough and conservative episode length is 20 mins.
780,000,000 x 20 = ?
Holy moly.
This data isn’t new but it’s nice to see a snapshot of a year in Australia’s podcast consumption.
I’ll have a crack at finding a similar figure for other markets next.
Interested in what you take from it.
Let me know in the comments.
There’s a part two to this — a rough look at the revenue side of the podcast business in Australia.
UPDATE
This story was posted on Reddit and one user did some more arithmatic about Australian listening potential.
About me at the moment
I’m working at the Mushroom Group to set up our podcast production here. Early days.
I also co-founded the little podcast production company Nearly Media.
SOURCES
A16Z — Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem in 2019
EDISON — The Infinate Dial AUS 2019
ABS 3101.0 — Australian Demographic Statistics DEC 2018
PwC — Entertainment and Media Trends Analysis
APPENDIX 1 — Calculation of Australian population aged 12 years and over.
Using ABS 3101.0, page 30, I subtracted groups 0–4 and 5–9 from total population.
Then further subtracted 800,000, more than half of the next group 10–14 to account for Australia’s increasing population.
This gave me 21,005,871 from a total population of 24,992,747
