👂Untapped Ears: The Real Podcast Audience Is Bigger Than You Think 📈

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Podcast consumption is significantly undercounted due to widespread co-listening, which involves friends, family, and children. This phenomenon affects audience estimates and the potential reach of podcast advertisements.

TVision reports TV audiences typically involve 1.3 viewers, and certain family apps like Disney+ have much higher joint tuning with 1.8 viewers

Edison's "Share of Ear" reports 11% of podcast time spent occurs on smart speakers and 6% occurs via connected TVs, both in-room devices

17% of podcast time spent occurs in-car when others could be listening along

• Co-listening Impact: 14% of weekly podcast consumers frequently co-listen with others, meaning the actual number of listeners is higher than reported.

  • New research indicates that 36% of weekly podcast consumers with children have listened to podcasts with their kids, and 12% frequently do so.

• Genre Variations: Certain podcast genres have higher rates of co-listening, such as kids/family (31%) and rewatch podcasts (26%).

  • The study highlights that consumers who frequently co-listen are more likely to engage with specific genres.

• Audience Profile: Heavy podcast consumers, particularly men and those who watch podcasts, often have side hustles, making them a prime target for advertisers.

  • 60% of 18-34-year-old podcast consumers have a side hustle, showing a significant overlap between heavy podcast listeners and entrepreneurs.

• Content Preferences: Podcast Pioneers and women are more likely to go back and listen to previous episodes of their favorite shows.

  • 73% of women and 72% of Podcast Pioneers revisit old episodes, compared to lower rates among other groups.

• Platform Usage: YouTube has emerged as the most popular platform for podcast consumption, surpassing Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  • 31% of podcast consumers use YouTube most frequently, with Spotify at 21% and Apple Podcasts at 12%.

• Discovery Trends: Among social media platforms, TikTok leads in podcast discovery for the 18-34 age group.

  • 16% of young podcast consumers find new podcasts on TikTok, outpacing Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X.

Commentary:

Understanding the full scope of podcast consumption is crucial for advertisers and content creators. Recognizing the impact of co-listening can help the industry more accurately measure audience size and effectiveness, leading to better-targeted advertising strategies and more engaging content. The thing with co-listening, as the study describes, is it doesn't even account for re-telling to friends and partners, something that doesn't happen as much with social content, websites, or even streaming series.

Follow Up:

To explore further, investigate how co-listening affects ad effectiveness and compare it with audience measurement approaches in other media industries, especially if you’re in a genre with high co-listening levels. And if you’re not, consider if you can experiment with episodes or strategies to encourage listening together with people.

Also consider dynamic ad insertion, where you insert new ads into older posts. This allows the content to be more fresh to folks that come back to an episode- which only counts if you keep the ad engaging. Which I also want to underline, if you have captivating ads, you’ll be able to keep the ad up. Because good content, regardless, is evergreen.

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