Digital Podcast today released the first update to the Podcast Value Chain Report focused on the growth of podcast content. The project summary report The Podcast Value Chain Report: 3Q 2005 Update – The Podcast Content Bubble provides an overview of the extreme growth in podcast content during the third quarter of 2005.

The report examines the supply demand balance of different podcast content and major content trends that appear to be emerging.

Among the studies major findings:

• Podcast content continues to grow extremely fast
• Podcasts can no longer be characterized as “audio blogs”
• Mainstream TV and Radio have contributed significant content in the third quarter, without much thought about makes for a good podcast
• Supply and demand for podcasts by content type is still unbalanced and presents opportunities for new breakout podcasts, particularly in Adult and Audio Book categories
• Recent developments including Yahoo’s new podcast directory and the new video features in iTunes are accelerating the rate of content growth

Digital Podcast has catalogued a sample of over 2,900 podcasts as part of this project and user visits averaging 300,000 per month.

The genres of music, science & technology and comedy & humor have the highest share of publicly available podcasts representing over 38% of available podcasts.

Erotica, comedy and music are the most viewed categories representing a combined 27.3% share of category views.

Erotica continues to be the most viewed category with an 11.3% share of category visits, yet also continues to represent less than 1% of the available podcasts.

Books is also a category where interest continues to exceed demand. This category represented 5.9% of category visits, but only represents 1.7% of podcast listings.

Key content trends to watch in the fourth quarter:

• Videocasts, particularly in the erotic/Adult category
• Podcasting as a business tool
• Educational podcasts
• Tivocasts – podcasts providing DVD-style commentary
• Community podcasting – community user contributed content

In this content bubble, traditional media and podcasters are scrambling to get podcasts out there, much the same as the bubble days of the web when everyone was rushing get a website up and running. Finding ways to make podcasts commercially successful, effective podcast search, the ways to use podcasting as tool to change business economics and many other major insights are still over the horizon.

The complete summary report is issued under creative commons license and can be found at http://www.digitalpodcast.com/podcastvaluechain.php

There is much debate in the podcast community regarding the impact on radio. At the extreme podcasting has been called the end of radio, but the real answer is much more complicated.

Radio has significant advantages of being broadcast and immediate with a legal way to use licensed music and a massively installed base of easy to use distribution(everybody has lots of radios and using them is real easy).

Podcasts have the advantage of listen when you want, no FCC restrictions, massively lower production costs for producing a show, insignicant capital costs to play and a huge number of people who are able bring a massive amount of imagination and innovation to content.

My personal take is:

1. Podcasting, satellite radio and streaming content all have a small piece of the audio listening market, with radio still having a very high share of the market

2. Podcasting, satellite radio and streaming content will continue to grow and take market share from radio – making growth for radio stations difficult at best.

3. Weak radio shows and stations that don’t seize the opportunity to innovate will feel most of the impact. Strong shows and strong stations that embrace the new technologies to their advantage will stay strong.

4. Strong radio shows that leverage these new technologies will benefit from expanding their listener base to non-local and/or time shifted audiences.

5. Innovative and strong radio stations will be able to profit from their ability to drive listeners to podcasts that benefit the radio station in some ways. For example, strong proprietary content or infomercial podcasts produced by sponsors.

6. New radio stars will emerge from podcasting and radio stations that find them will benefit from taking these new stars from podcast to broadcast.

The level of competition is going up and that means there will be changes depending on where the radio station is now and what they choose to do going forward

• the weak/change resistant stations will feel the most negative impact
• the weak/innovative stations may be able to use this changed environment to reposition themselves into strong players – for example, there is weak radio station in San Francisco that is broadcasting podcasts as a way to re-position the station ( for more on this check here http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67344,00.html )
• the strong/change resistant stations will feel a negative impact, but it will be slow erosion
• the strong and innovative stations will find ways to use these new technologies to maintain and improve their positions