No disrespect to Peter Chen or the Diffusion Group or anyone else that has done podcasting research thus far, but I was pleased to see a research report from Forrester. Finally something from a widely respected and referenced research group. Also refreshing is the fact that the report doesn't make podcasting out to be an amazingly fast growing technology (though it is growing pretty quickly and will probably grow faster over the next couple years). In the new report, titled "Podcasting Hits The Charts", Forrester shows that only 1% of North American households regularly download and listen to podcasts:
Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.
So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.
That first sentence is incredibly important, I think. Podcasting still isn't easy enough for most people! And yes, these things take time, but hopefully we can help solve that problem in a couple months. The goal of our podcasting solution is to first of all make it easy.
The second bit of stuff I quoted there is important too. We're doing a lot of our own research on the business sector of podcasting right now, and we really agree - there's a huge market. Podcasting is an excellent way to solve some communication problems that have always existed.
More at Charlene Li's Blog