An uphill struggle
Just when you begin to believe that podcasting is taking off, along comes a story like this (albeit based on research in the US) to bring you back down to earth.
Even more of a shock was the online poll that the BBC conducted:
VOTE RESULTS
What is your stance on podcasting?
I download and listen to them
24.52%
I download but rarely listen
14.47%
I am not interested at all
61.00%
15462 Votes Cast
Results are indicative and may not reflect public opinion
It’s a sobering response and indicates just how much more we podcasters have to do to convince the public that our podcasts are worth downloading and listening to. Let’s get to it !
Where does this show ??
November 27th, 2006 17:31
The BBC is not sharing with us any stats on its wn podcast trial. This has been going on over a year, and hasn’t been pulled. Indeed, they keep adding new shows to the trial. So I guess it’s probably doing well for the BBC, pulling in a global audience to its mainly spoken word output. I bet the BBC podcasts get more than 15,000 downloads!
You and I, of course, are just guys playing in our garden sheds. However proud we may be of the fact that our listener figures continue to rise, those numbers are tiny in the scale of things. But we’re happy.
You could also look at it this way. You and I find and play the music that doesn’t get on radio playlists. If the vast mass of the public prefer (say) Coldplay (and not everyone shares my views on that band) to (say) Phideaux to the extent that Phideaux has not yet been able to marry a Hollywood star, they’re going to need a lot of working on to listen to what we play anyway, even if it is vastly superior music.
No, podcasting isn’t mainstream. But more people listen to podcasts now than did 12 months ago. And one of the beauties of the medium is that you can find podcasts on every subject, however specialist or “fringe”.
By the way, that research got the answers its questions wanted. If the questions were asked a little differently, the answers might have been very different. And I think that to find that a quarter of BBC respondents said that they do download and listen to podcasts was actually not a bad start.