Following Up on the Podcasting Dope
A number of people have both agreed and disagreed with me on my not smoking the podcasting dope. My opinion hasn’t changed–I still think the phenomenon is over-hyped and destined to suffer fate of FM radio–but I’ve appreciated the range of opinions that I’ve heard:
- Travis: “I think it’s clear people are choosing to balance the dude in his pyjamas against the CBC–and Darren must think so too, because isn’t that what blogging is doing?”
- Shel: “But I’ll go out on a limb and predict that some form of podcasting, evolved from its current nascent state, will be an integral part of the media mix in five years’ time.”
- Robert: “I am to blame for the hype. It’s the worst thing I’ve done to the community lately.”
Paris Hilton is apparently podcasting now, so what do I know? I can think of no better reason to stop podcasting than to be less like her. [more]
I also wanted to highlight this highly questionable survey (“Podcasting catches on”) being propounded by Pew Internet and American Life Project. They claim that “more than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web.”
I originally read about this on Steve Rubel’s site, so I’ll repeat my comments from there. Pew managed to talk to all of 208 MP3 owners, making the margin for error on that podcasting number +/- 7.5%. Any statistician will tell you that’s an extremely small–indeed, statistically insignficant–sample group.
A secondary, but interesting point, is that the question asked of the MP3 owners was “Have you ever downloaded a podcast or internet radio program so you could listen to it on your digital audio player at a later time?” The use of the terms ‘downloaded’ and ‘internet radio program’ obfuscate the results. Put those two terms together, and I could imagine a number of false positives from people thinking the surveyor esentially meant “listened to the radio on the Internet” (or, for example, downloaded an NPR program from Audible.com). A better question might have been “have you ever listened to time-shifted audio on a portable device?”.
Do the math. As several other people have commented, it’s highly unlikely that 6.38 million Americans have listened to podcasts yet.
UPDATE: To follow up on my follow-up, Pew has confessed that their survey was largely bogus. Smells like they’re spinning a bad decision.
