“Following a steady increase in podcast listening over the past decade, podcasts have become a big part of the normal routine – and news diet – of many Americans, especially younger adults.” –Pew Research Center
Here are the top-level takeaways identified by the study authors:
- Podcasts are popular: About half of Americans have listened to a podcast in the past year, and one-in-five of those listeners say they listen to a podcast nearly every day.
- Listeners turn to podcasts for entertainment, learning, and simply to have something to listen to while doing something else.
- Comedy, entertainment, and politics are at the top of the list of topics that podcast listeners say they regularly listen to.
- Most podcast listeners say they hear news discussed on podcasts – however, just one-in-five listeners say they listen to a podcast that’s connected to a news organization.
About half of the survey group have listened to a podcast in the past year (that would be 2022). Politically, the split of Republicans and Democrats is fairly even: 46%-54% respectively.
There is more political spin to this metric; Pew determined that Republicans and Democrats are characterized by different news consumption habits within which podcast listening plays a part — specifically, the extent to which each group relies on podcasting for news (see below).
Unsurprisingly, regarding age groups, Pew finds what all other research efforts have found: podcast listening skews young. Here are the Pew specifics:
There is much more to browse on Pew’s eight-page analysis. See it HERE.
