Our good friend Om Malik basically trashes a new report by The Diffusion Group that podcast consumption will grow from “15% of portable digital music player owners in 2004 to 75% by 2010.”
CNET, on the other hand, leads with this:
Researchers at The Diffusion Group predicted this week that the U.S. podcast audience will climb from 840,000 last year to 56 million by 2010. By that time, three-quarters of all people who own portable digital music players will listen to podcasts, up from less than 15 percent last year, the digital entertainment research group said.
To their credit, they do come back with this:
But collecting podcast statistics is a tricky business. The Pew Internet and American Life Project created a stir a few months ago when it claimed a whopping 6 million Americans are listening to podcasts. The nonprofit’s research director later backtracked when pressed by Web log Engadget, admitting the number was probably too high because of the way the group phrased its survey.
Even The Diffusion Group’s figures are much higher than those found in podcast forecasts from other research firms. For instance, Forrester Research predicted in April that just 12.3 million U.S. households will use MP3 players to listen to audio podcasts by the end of the decade.
So in summary, no one has a clue what’s going on with the real figures for podcasting. I’d say check with Peter Rojas or Om Malik before you trust any of these figures. Oh, and analysts, can we please just stick to podcast, and not Òtime-shifted digital audio files”?
