Podcast Audience Growing Faster Than Podcast Advertising
May 13th, 2009 | By Elisabeth Lewin | Category: Featured Story, Making Money with Podcasts 
Podcast advertising revenue is growing, but not as quickly as for other online media. An article today from eMarketer says that by 2011, podcast ad spending will grow to $43 million — but that amount comes to “less than 0.2% of [media services firm] ZenithOptimedia‘s projection for the total online advertising space.”
ZenithOptimedia, a communications strategy company, forecasts that $28 million will be spent on podcast advertising in the United States this year. They expect it to grow at an increasing rate over the next several years. But the podcast advertising industry will not grow as quickly as, or to the magnitude of, other online media like paid search, display ads, or Internet radio.
Compared with terrestrial radio (which is losing ad money, year-to-year) with a forecast $14 billion in revenue, eMarketer says, “The appetite for podcasts is fairly light.”
“Much like blogging, podcasting is proving to be profitable to those who have premium content, but less so to everyday citizens who use the medium to reach long-tail audiences,†said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst in the article.
But should you consider this report bad news for podcasters, or the downloadable media industry?
And are the forecast $28 million in ad revenues this year going to prove elusive to “everyday citizens,” as eMarketer’s Verna suggests?
Edison Research says, in their latest report, “The Infinite Dial, 2009,” that the US podcast audience has grown by 22% since last year, expanding from 18% of all Americans in 2008 to 22% in 2009.
Combine steady, unrelenting audience growth with steady increases in advertising revenue, and, from our perspective, the future for the podcast industry looks pretty promising. Attention to traditional media is eroding, and attention to online media is growing. If you create online content, or work with folks who do, that’s good news.
The podcasting piece of the online ad revenue pie is small, but the pie (and the size of our “slice”) gets bigger each year. Even for those “everyday citizens” Verna talks about.
Maybe we are suffering from irrational exhuberance, but we see this steady growth as a really good thing.
What do you think?
I think that we saw a burst of the podcast hype bubble from a few years ago. This is a good thing. The field is of new shows that are making money is more narrow (and the format is better established) now and major media outlets feel that it’s now safe to enter the format. When those companies (NPR, CNN, WSJ, etc) have established presence and community online, their influence spreads to those who want to podcast for fun (not much growth, but putting out episodes because it’s fun to have a radio show online) and we wind up with more shows and a larger audience, but less of those people are actively looking to make money off of their shows.
I think that’s how it will play out, but we’ll see. The other side of it is that people like listening more than companies like paying.
I’m still out here serving an extremely small audience (MSers) with tunes and talk.
I’ve had over 135k episode downloads since 2006 (that works out to over 156m views [MS afflicts 1 in 1,200] if I wasn’t focusing strictly on MSers, [They’re coming from the web {87.3%} and via iTunes (12.2%.}])
That is an acceptable audience from the point of view of the reach, coverage and frequency for any advertising campaign for products that are otherwise totally unadvertised, except for the drug regimens that support the print publications of the NMSS and the MSAA and the ads that get into their very limited space for their market place section.
It especially good that my audience have stuck with me through my own personal evolution.
The ability of the internet to self selectively narrow cast is what is standing the advertising world on its ear. They don’t trust anything that seems to change the focus of advertising from competition to collaboration.
The traditional “Push” world of media advertising is having a hard time dealing with the new “Pull” world of the internet.
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As a company that is one of the leaders in the podcast advertising space. We see spend levels in 2009 continuing to increase. But there have always been challenges in selling certain Genres.
While we have mostly CPM based ad buys I see some of our competitors rolling mostly CPA based buys which is concerning.
While we are having a banner year, info at blog.rawvoice.com we would like to see some more companies jumping into the podcast advertising space.
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[…] Amerikaner (27 Millionen Menschen), die im vergangenen Monat einen Podcast genutzt haben. (via Podcastingnews und […]