Who is the Average Podcast Consumer in 2018?
By Andy Beaubien, BPR
A recent study on podcast use in America showed that podcast use continues to trend upward. However, as Mark Ramsey of Ramsey Media pointed out, the podcast audience is not typical of the population. Podcast users are generally higher income and higher educated. Podcasts are favoured by people who prefer public over private radio.
Ramsey writes, “The audience is “too smart” because the tech is too complicated, the menu is thin on familiar hits and skewed towards genre programming and what used to be called public radio.” In other words, podcasts are still too high tech for the average person.
Beyond the technical barrier, perhaps one the biggest factors limiting podcast growth is content. Podcast content is too often narrow in its appeal. As radio broadcasters learned decades ago, the best way to reach a mass appeal audience is to give them mass appeal content.
Podcast use will continue to grow but the rate of that growth may well be linked to simpler access and content that is designed for a wider audience. When it comes to content, no one knows how to do it better than radio broadcasters – the original pioneers of audio content.
Tags: Insights, Podcasting
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