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.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Darren, while I AM smoking the podcasting dope (see link) I do agree with you about the numbers in that report. Reputable research firm or not, 6 million is simply unreasonable.
Some more things to consider (as I commented on Steve’s post originally) are the number of downloads that podcasting software has received and the number of podcasts in existence. There’s only 5000 podcasts out there, and iPodder lemon has only been downloaded 125,000 times.
“Any statistician will tell you that’s an extremely small–indeed, statistically insignficant–sample group.”
I don’t know – a ramdom sample of 208 people seems statistically significant enough for me. Anyway, this is why they quote a confidence interval (aka “error”) for the sample – the smaller the sample size, the larger the confidence interval. Increasing the sample size doesn’t necessarily mean the accuracy of the survey would be improved though, as the number of false positives would also increase.
Also, I think it is a bit misleading to say that Pew only talked to 208 owners of Mp3 players. While this is technically true, the 208 mp3 player owners were a sub-set of a total of 2,201 respondents.
Scott: Well, if we’re going to split hairs, Pew should have reported the roughly 10,000 people they contacted before they got 2201 respondents. The standard respondent rate for phone surveys is now down to 20% and declining. That suggests something significantly flawed with the entire polling strategy.
Good point on Pew’s ambiguous questions, Darren. But how many people are going to know the term ‘time-shifted audio’. I think the most of the points you make are still valid, though.
I agree 100% on the Paris Hilton factor: If that skank is doing something, I’ll take that as a reason to avoid it at all costs.
I agree 100% on the Paris Hilton factor: If that skank is doing something, I’ll take that as a reason to avoid it at all costs.
Which is just as bad as doing something because she’s doing it.