A new report on podcast listeners reveals over half are likely to consider buying from a brand advertised on a podcast.
The 54% of listeners who are either “somewhat” or “much more” likely to consider buying from a podcast sponsor vastly outweighs the 7% of listeners who are less likely.
However, there’s a notable amount of people who fall somewhere in the middle, saying they’re neither likely or unlikely to consider buying from a podcast sponsor.
This data comes from the Podcast Consumer 2019 survey conducted by Edison Research. The survey aims to gather information about the behavior of podcast listeners in America.
Here are some other key findings from the survey.
The audience for podcasts is growing
As of 2019, 51% of Americans over 12 years of age have listened to a podcast, with 32% having listened in the past month, and 22% in the past week.
Further, 41% of monthly podcast listeners say they are listening to more podcasts now compared to one year ago.
The podcasting audience is growing across all demographics, but especially amongst listers age 12-24.
Survey respondents say their number one source used to discover podcasts is search engines.
What are they listening to?
According to the survey, podcast topics that listeners are most interested in are:
- Music – 39%
- News/Information – 36%
- Entertainment/Celebrity/Gossip – 32%
- History – 31%
- Sports – 31%
- Food – 30%
- Mystery/Thriller – 28%
- Technology – 28%
- True Crime – 28%
- Wellness/Self-improvement – 27%
- Science – 26%
Why is podcast advertising so effective?
The report doesn’t provide a whole lot of analysis about its findings. However, you can get an idea of why podcast advertising is so effective by looking at certain stats.
According to the survey, 90% of respondents say they listen to podcasts at home, and 70% say they listen while not doing anything else.
So here you have a captive audience giving their full attention to what’s being said on the podcast
When an ad comes up in a podcast, listeners are more susceptible to the message because many of them are not focusing on anything else.
That’s a stark contrast from other types of web advertising which competes with all kinds of distractions to grab a person’s attention.
For even more data on podcast listeners, see the full report here.
