Ira Glass: Podcast Increased This American Life Audience By Half A Million
Apr 16th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: Audio Podcasting, Podcasting 
Anyone who thinks that podcasting is a niche media for geeks should check out what Ira Glass has to say on how podcasts grew This American Life’s audience:
Podcast fan: Have you found that podcasting has changed This American Life?
Ira Glass: Interestingly, it’s pulled in a much younger audience.
The radio audience has stayed the same size – 1.8 million people a week – but now there’s this extra half million people and they’re much much younger than the public radio audience.
Which is fantastic, of course. I know meet lots of people in their teens and twenties at our live events, and some of them aren’t public radio listeners at all. They simply know us as a podcast.
In terms of content this hasn’t changed the show but in terms of reach, it’s really nice.
Glass didn’t lose radio listeners by offering a podcast, he gained half a million listeners that otherwise would not have heard his show.
Glass’s experience with This American Life’s podcasts demonstrates how powerful podcasts can be for reaching people that prefer to consume media on their own schedule.
To anybody who gives me crap about it being ‘like’ and ‘ums.’ spewing from the mouths of tweenage amateurs, I would refer them to Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and up up the alphabet.
I would point them at the iTunes Music Store for where to get podcasts on anything and everything… (There are 2 podcasts on Model Railroading, there are 30 podcasts on Otaku, 30 on amine, 12 on multiple sclerosis, on … anything and everything.)
I would point them at podcasts with large (multi million downloads per week, like Adam Carolla,) and tell them to look at some industry download stats.
Its definitely NOT a fad.
Its become the tail that wags the dog.
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I recently retired and listen to TAL podcasts all the time on my walks and when I’m doing any travelling (by train, plane, bus). The one thing that bugs me about Ira Glass is he talks so fast often drops the last word in a sentence, leaving me frustrated that I didn’t catch what he said. The stories are great, though.
There is more to life than increasing the speed, Slow down so we can understand you Ira!
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