Snapchat and Podcasting Growth: What the Research Reveals

Wondering if you should get into Snapchat?

Is podcasting something you're considering?

To discover more, I interview Tom Webster from Edison Research about his latest study on Snapchat and podcasting adoption.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Tom Webster, vice president of strategy and marketing at Edison Research and co-host of the Marketing Companion podcast. Tom is a specialist in consumer behavior and media consumption.

Tom will explore his brand-new research from The Infinite Dial, focused on Snapchat and podcast adoption.

You'll discover reasons to embrace Snapchat and podcasting for your business.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Snapchat Growth
About the study

Research from The Infinite Dial series dates back to 1998, according to Tom, and it's the longest-running study on digital habits, behaviors, and consumption. They have trending graphs for areas, such as Internet radio, that go back to 1998. Plus, they've measured all kinds of behaviors and patterns in relation to consumption of audio, video, social, and mobile. Tom has been involved with the study and has been the voice of the studies on webinars since 2004.

When the series started in 1998, it was focused more on digital audio. While today's brands and streaming audio like Pandora and Spotify weren't around back then, there were plenty of others. For example there was Broadcast.com, which Mark Cuban sold to Yahoo, NetRadio, Spinner, AOL Radio, and lots of other fledgling brands, Tom explains. The survey was a means to track them and put them in their place in the universe.

As behaviors started to migrate to various media (as opposed to the text-driven medium that it had been previously), The Infinite Dial started tracking that too. Over the years, they added podcasting, social media, and so on. Essentially, if people do it online, The Infinite Dial is interested in measuring how it's consumed.

The Infinite Dial's goal was always to create the survey of record in the various fields covered, so they spend nearly six figures in hard costs on mobile and landline telephone sampling to make a study that's random, representative, and projectable to the United States population.

Tom loves coming out with new facts every year that corroborate what he sees people do online.

Listen to the show to learn more about the survey sampling and why they survey via telephone.

Podcast growth

One of the things Tom loves about doing survey research is that although it reflects the current state of America, it typically lags behind what the digerati think. It can lag by quite a bit, he says, but if it's a real thing, it eventually gets there.

The Infinite Dial added podcast tracking back in 2007. Two years ago, before Serial popularized podcasting, research showed that 15% of Americans 12+ listened to a podcast in the past 12 months. While that's a huge number (tens and tens of millions of Americans), it had been growing steadily, but not exponentially.

Podcasting inched up from 9% in 2008 to 11% to 2009. And to 12% in 2010. For a short time, podcasting plateaued before jumping to 15% in 2014. After Serial came out, there was enormous advertiser, brand, and insider interest in podcasting. Listenership went from 15% in 2014 to 17% in 2015. In 2016, podcast listening has surpassed 21% already. That's a 24% increase year over year in the percentage of Americans who listened to a podcast.

The Serial effect didn't happen immediately, Tom continues, although it made people a lot more aware of the on-demand content out ther...