Podcasting Continues Explosive Growth
Feedburner has released an excellent analysis of the growth in podcasting in its Burning Question Blog
They report three key findings:
- FeedBurner alone manages more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide
- Podcasting is outpacing the speed of adoption of the last “most successful consumer product launch in history”
- Podcast directories are growing, and driving activity back to podcasters’ originating Web sites. As we saw with text feeds, distribution begins as a mechanism to drive traffic back to the originating source and then evolves to become its own consumption medium
The number of podcasts feeds being managed by Feedburner has just gone over 44,000, exceeding the number of radio stations and continues to grow at a rate of 15% per month.
Feedburner based podcasts represent 30% of Digital Podcast’s database of over 12,000 feeds. Extrapolating from that would indicate that there may be as many as 149,000 podcast feeds out there on the web.
In addition to the number of podcast feeds, Feedburner released data on the number of podcast and videocast feeds. The totals are now approaching 1.6 million subscribers to feeds using Feedburner and growing at a rate of 20% per month. If the same 30% ratio holds up that would indicate that there are over 5 million active subscribers to podcasts and videocasts.
It’s not surprising that iTunes leads the market with 57% of the subscribers using iTunes. It also points out the importance of not just having a one click button to iTunes, reaching the other 43% is still pretty important.
Feedburner also notes the viral nature of this distributed media and notes that the resyndication of the podcasts by podcast directories is driving substantial traffic to podcasters (in excess of 930,000 out bound visits to podcaster websites from Digital Podcast alone). I would also note that it is not just single level resyndication as services like the Digital Podcast Search Service are delivering substational multilevel syndication in sites like gada.be. The service since its inception has now responded to over 300,000 search requests and delivered over 3,000,000 searh results.
