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At first glance, podcasts seem like a new phenomenon of today‘s blogger scene, but contrary to this assumption, their beginnings can be dated back to the 1980s. Back then the so-called audio blogs were mainly music-oriented or were used for educational purposes.
In the 90s the first subscriptions to such audio contributions were offered on websites. The expansion of the WWW and the spread of portable audio playback devices contributed to the further spread of podcasts.
Podcasts have been available on Apple’s iTunes since 2005, which led to the ultimate breakthrough all over the world: Around 40% of the Spanish are now listening to podcasts in general, in South Korea it is even more than half of the population. Almost a quarter of all Americans nowadays consume a podcast at least once a week, and the number of listeners to some of them is in the three-digit million range. But what makes podcasts so interesting?
On the one hand, the content can be consumed completely independently of time and location and, on the other hand, the listeners can decide exactly what to listen to. Today there is a specific podcast for almost every topic or market niche, no matter how small. And consumers seem to enjoy that.
Podcasts - whether produced commercially or by private individuals / influencers - often play a major role in the opinion formation of their listeners and have therefore become particularly interesting for advertisers. Target groups can be addressed very specifically and ads can thus be placed without major wastage. At the moment there is a lot of experimentation going on in this area to find out which type of advertising would be most appealing to listeners. Examples of this are audio spots, sponsoring or even native ads, i.e. advertisements that as such are difficult to distinguish from the content per se.
The numbers are impressive: advertising revenues in the US podcast market are climbing to almost 500 million US dollars. Podcasts can be scaled well, using metrics such as the number of downloads, listeners and subscribers - but content analysis has been a challenge so far.
Advanced media monitoring solutions designed specifically for audio content bring clarity to podcasting. They examine podcasts for user-defined keywords and provide reliable real-time information on hits. They not only provide evidence of mentions, but also transcripts and therefore information on current trends and opinions - and there are many of those.
According to PodcastInsights, there are currently more than 1,750,000 podcasts - around half of all US households and thus more than 60 million people listen to them regularly in the United States alone (Nielsen, 2017).
Would you like to find out who is talking about you or your company in their podcasts, whether your advertising measures are being implemented in a target-group oriented manner or what other podcasters are sharing? Simply click on the button below to arrange a demo and check out the eMM media monitoring solution. Make audio-content visible - with eMM.
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