Last week I had the privilege of being invited to share some of our current data on podcasting as a part of the ADM’s “Get The Download” event at ad:tech SF. This week, we are making our most recent Podcasting data publicly available at our site, and I will be expanding on the current state of the audience for podcasting at Podcamp NYC later this week (where I have the last slot of the day on Friday–nothing readies you to get your drink on like a big bucket o’ numbers, but I promise to be concise!) My job at Edison Media Research is to analyze data and tell the story behind the numbers-whether those stories are good, or bad. In the case of the current state of podcasting, the story is good, so I am pleased to be able to share it with you here.

This year, our third annual Podcast Consumer Revealed report (derived from the 2008 Arbitron/Edison Media Research Internet and Multimedia study) details significant gains in both audio and video podcast consumption. The audience for downloadable media is not only growing, but also represents a very attractive target for advertising. Our national data shows that more than one in five Americans have ever downloaded and watched/listened to a podcast, which breaks down further to 18% of Americans having ever listened to an audio podcast, and 16% having ever watched a video podcast. Those numbers are up sharply from last year’s figures, which were 13% and 11%, respectively. Nine percent of Americans 12+ have listened to an audio podcast in the past month, and those 23 million Americans are affluent, spend lots of time (and money!) online, and are increasingly more difficult to target with interruption advertising.

All of this represents good news for Podcast producers, and I encourage you to download the study and use it wherever you deem helpful. As a part of this release, I listed some implications/recommendations for podcast producers to consider, which I won’t recapitulate here. I will, however, touch on one of the findings of this study, and flip it on its head for a moment. I was unsurprised to see that many podcast consumers were also users of various social networking sites. For instance, about a quarter of Americans who have ever watched or listened to a podcast maintain their own profile page at Myspace. You may also find this data to be unremarkable, especially if you, too, are a relentless “profile-pruner” like I am. One can no doubt conclude from this that social networking sites and services may be an effective means to promote your podcast, especially when everyone “seems” to be on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Change occurs at the margin, and it would be unwise to ignore the increasing popularity and utility of the various social networking sites. However, as a researcher of that big ole’ middle of the bell curve, I am compelled to add here that this means that the vast majority of podcast users–and of Americans, period–do not maintain social networking profiles. This means that if you confine your marketing and promotional efforts to getting the word out on social networking sites, you are depriving your podcast of a potentially much greater audience. If you produce a podcast on restoring and customizing automobiles, for instance, the number of auto aficionados on Twitter is a rounding error compared to the vast size of this potential affinity group. If you are creating well-written, well-produced quality content on a topic or subject, you have as much right to the big fat middle of the tail as you do the long part, so think big–and market your content accordingly. I would love to see more and more partnerships between mass media broadcasters and independent content producers. You need each other. The ADM’s recent announcements on standards provide a common nomenclature for traditional and new media content providers alike to communicate with each other and with advertisers, so I encourage you to review them and get involved.

We at Edison are very proud of this research series (the main Arbitron/Edison study from which it is derived is now in its 16th iteration) and we hope it helps you in your quest to grab whatever part of that tail you are reaching for. I am happy to answer questions–grab me in Brooklyn (before I slink off to Peter Luger, that is!), contact me at our website, or follow me on Twitter (@webby2001). Good luck!

Tom Webster, VP Strategy and Marketing, Edison Media Research