Podcast Audience Strategy: What Your Downloads Can’t Tell You
Edison is on the eve of releasing our first quarterly Podcast Consumer Tracker report, the industry’s only all-inclusive measure of the reach of the leading podcast publishers and their audience composition. While that data is necessarily confined to our subscribers, I wanted to pass on a general observation about something I don’t really hear talked about in podcasting: reach.
Certainly, we talk a lot about the reach of podcasting in general, and we put a lot of effort into a credible estimator of that reach in our Infinite Dial research series. But when it comes to individual networks, publishers, or even shows, the dialog shifts to downloads, not reach. And I’m not even talking about counting the number of listens — we certainly aren’t there yet, but we are approaching it. No, I’m merely talking about the percentage of the podcast listening audience that has listened to programming from a given publisher.
The industry has been very focused on downloads, and the two levers that most manipulate that number — frequency of release, and cross-promotion. In other words, if a network wants to move its download figures to a significant degree, it can either increase the frequency of release (from weekly to semiweekly or daily) OR it can relentlessly cross-promote new network Show B to the already established network…
