I stumbled upon a report by Edison stating that podcast listening is going up. Aside from the encouraging numbers, the Edison report did one thing right and one thing wrong.
What Edison did right in this report is that it called the people they surveyed for this report podcast consumers. This then incorporates both audio podcast listeners and video podcast viewers.
But what Edison did wrong was focus only on audio podcasting throughout its report. People who read the report will assume that podcasting is ONLY audio.
I hear this so often when I speak to people:
“Oh, I know about podcasting. And video is a great marketing vehicle too, isn’t it?”
When did podcasting become audio only? Podcasting is video too. Heck, I’ve even seen people podcast powerpoint slides and PDFs in iTunes.
So, podcasting is audio AND video. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Leesa:
To be fair, there is only one “audio-only” slide in the PDF of our data, and it is immediately followed by a video-only slide. The questions were all asked of both audio and video podcast consumers, and the “A/V Podcast Consumer” sample base is shown for the majority of the graphs.
Thanks for posting!
Tom Webster
Vice President
Edison Media Research
Even worse is when someone says: “Oh yeah I know about podcasting, but isn’t video going to eclipse it?”
I agree, podcasting can certainly be audio or video.
One definition I’ve seen that I like is “Personal On-Demand broadCast” – because a podcast really is all about the delivery of media (audio or video), for personal on-demand consumption.
Awesome distinction Mike. More and more, people are starting to realize this as well.
I think the definition for podcast has blurred as to what a podcast is. A podcast is the delivery method, NOT the content. I could have an audio show that gets put on the radio and is published via podcast. I could have a video that is put on TV and via podcast.