Meaningless argument about the size of the podcasting market

A new Forrester report shows that only 1% of (US) online households regularly download and listen to podcasts in 2006; a total of 700,000 households. Detractors of the apparent minisculity of that number – mainly those with a vested interest in the podcasts market – point, as Om Malik says, to a Diffusion Group report that instead says 15% of portable music player owners (a different metric entirely) use podcasts and that this figure will grow to 75% by 2010. A Pew report from Mar05 also shows that 29% of the 22 million (US) adults who own an MP3 player – 6 million people – have downloaded podcasts.

The devil, as so often, is in the detail – Forrester is tracking people who “regularly” use podcasts, Diffusion is tracking stated “demand” for the medium and Pew is simply measuring everyone who has ever tried podcasting out. This makes the Forrester numbers the most useful to have emerged so far – plenty of people, myself included, would answer “yes” to the Pew’s “have you ever?” and “no” to Forrester’s “do you regularly?”.