The numbers are (still) clear - podcasting is big time. EMarketer has released numbers today showing exactly how big time podcasting is presently, and projections on where it is going. By their survey, the US podcast audience alone has reached 18.5 Million audience members in 2008, and number expected to increase by another ten million by the end of 2008.
EMarketer predict that along the current trend lines that podcasting audiences will grow to a whopping 65 million members in the US alone, or one fifth of the current US population. Personally, I think the numbers may a bit low, and quite possibly by 2012, completely irrelevant, unless the study deals exclusively with audio podcasts (a distinction that isn't explicitly made).
As with [img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/feed-icon-14x14.png" caption="" credit="" alt="feed-icon-14×14.png"] our podcast at Mashable, podcast feeds are increasingly becoming mixed media, and the rich media showcased on those feeds are increasingly distributed and widely consumed through methods other than typical standalone media players. With our podcast, while we have a respectable subscriber count, even our audio podcasts see the great bulk of their downloads from the embedded player widgets.
With video content, the subscriber download to embedded player viewership becomes even more disparate. It isn't uncommon for some top-tier video podcasters to see podcast downloads of only hundreds of thousands, but embedded player views in the tens of millions.
But What About the Money
Despite what Dave Winer claims, there is money to be made in podcast advertising. In 2007 alone, EMarketer estimates $165 million was made in podcast sponsorship of various types. That number is expected to grow to a $435 million by 2012.
Sounds great, right? Well, quite frankly they're slightly unbelievable numbers, if the active podcast audience size is to be believed. It was when I tried to figure out exactly how the the numbers broke down when it became clear to me that the average listener would have to be exposed to at least 25 podcast advertisements a week, a number that seems on quite the high side.
While it is true that most active podcast audience members likely listen to more than one show per week, most podcasts don't presently run advertisements in their shows for reasons I've outlined in great detail in the past. So that a generous 50% of podcasts that run ads are playing over four or five ads per episode to cover that gap is a bit far fetched.
My guess is that the podcast download numbers cited by eMarketer are vastly underestimated, because it is my experience that the problem is that podcasting is far under-monetized, not over monetized as these numbers would suggest.