Weekly podcast listening continues to grow in Jacobs Techsurvey

The full results of Jacobs Media annual Techsurvey are not released yet, but All Access got hold of one data point pertaining to podcast consumption. For the third straight year, weekly podcast listening nudged upward to 23%. That’s a slightly great share than the 21% of last year, and the 20% of 2016.

The pace of growth resembles what Edison Research shows in its Infinite Dial annual consumer research, which in march revealed 17% weekly listening, up from 15% in 2017 and 13% in 2016.

The Jacobs Techsurvey queries a large list of respondents, many of them drawn from radio station subscriber lists. As such, those individuals could be considered P1 radio listeners, and certainly the entire project is slanted toward a survey population that likes traditional radio (over the air or streamed). So the relatively strong adoption of weekly podcast listening from that cohort is interesting. The significance of weekly podcast listening among radio consumers might argue for commercial radio to quicken its own pace of adoption and podcast strategy development.

Brad Hill