As I sit on the sidelines wondering whether to do a weekly podcast, eMarketer is loudly pounding the table that the U.S. podcast audience could reach 25 million by 2008 and perhaps 50 million by 2010. The consulting firm also thinks advertising on podcasts will hit $80-million this year and $300-million by 2010. Is this hype or a fact of life? To be honest, I'm still regard podcasts as a geekie service appealing to geekie people but maybe I'm reading things wrong. It could be that podcasts represents the next new trend in audio broadcasts – hot on the heels of satellite-radio. It could be that eMarketer is right and podcasts will become a mainstream service in a few years. Then again, there's growing leeriness about how many people are reading the millions of blogs being created every year. To my way of thinking, it's difficult not to get the feeling that consulting firms have become too excited about the renewed interest in technology. With so much interest, there is a huge opportunity for these consulting firms to sell research to people who think they need to know what's happening. It should be pointed out the research firms (Forrester, Yankee Group, IDC, Gartner) played this game during the dot-com boom. While many of their projections failed to play out as expected at the time, many of their forecasts now materializing – albeit a few years later than what they envisioned.
Update: Steve Rubel thinks 50 million podcasts users is more than enough to attract the interest of advertisers.
One Comment
Hey Mark … get with it! (said with a joking tone – that would be easy to detect in a podcast).
I think podcasts are great. Okay, I may be a bit geeky, but the spoken word can convey so much more than the written word alone, and I can take it all in while I am doing other things – like driving. Some of the hardware technology needs to become more ubiquitous for Podcasts to become even more pervasive. For example; I would love to have a USB docking port as standard equipment in my car for my MP3 player, so that I could simply plug that puppy in and listen to my podcasts while I drive. All of this is possible today, but it is not as convenient as I would like. As for advertising revenues, etc., while … I don't know, but I would rather listen to selected Podcasts that I subscribe to, on the way into work than CDs, radio, or even satellite radio.
Of course there is a bit of hype here. But let me be a little controversial for a moment. I frankly believe that this Web2.0 stuff that a lot of your readers seem so excited about, is more hype than substance as well. Let's be honest; a lot of it does seem like 1999 regurgitated all over again. That being said, there is enough new value / substance in the recent Web changes that we should pay attention to it – even though nobody has been able to succinctly describe what it really is.