Millennials love podcasts; everyone likes smart speakers (Jacobs Media Techsurvey)

Hot out of the box today for public consumption, the annual Techsurvey from Jacobs Media digs into podcasting, smart speakers, and other media consumption details. The survey groups consists largely of people in radio station databases, so while it is not a pure P1 population, we assume a built-in favorability to radio. That is useful for questions about radio pros and cons, and also an interesting lens for non-radio questions.

In the podcasting portion, Techsurvey 13 found that 21% of respondents listen to podcasts at least weekly. Fifty-one percent of that consumption happens through phones. Podcasts are slightly more popular for men than women in this cohort, but the real demographic standout is the Millennial group which represents a third of listening:

Not the arrow (in the above graphic) which illustrates the demographic shift from older to younger in podcast consumption — until the youngest Gen Z group, which hasn’t taken up the habit as eagerly as Millennials.

Smart speakers — arguably representing the hottest platform category of 2017 — are part of Techsurvey 13. Gen X’ers, the next-older demo after Millennials, are the keenest adopters of voice commands on their devices. That doesn’t necessarily translate to Amazon Alexa or Google Home use, though, since voice commands are supported on all Android and iOS phones.

Moving to device purchase, Jacobs Media found that 11% of the survey group owns an Amazon Echo or Google Home device. That footprint is spread across age group with remarkable evenness, perhaps speaking to a broad appeal which will cause rampaging growth of these devices and their spinoffs.

Brad Hill