It Depends on what "Mass" Is

David Coursey writes that "Podcasting is not the next mass medium". The column has attracted the ire of some podcasters but in the main Coursey is right.

How many people -- worldwide -- are listening to podcasts? I estimate the current number is probably in the area of 1 million people with an optimistic estimate of no more than 5 million. There are somewhere between 5000 and 9000 podcasts available now but most of these have no more than 100-500 listeners. We can dismiss this long tail of podcasting by looking only at the top 100 podcasts. Inevitably at least one of the listeners of a top 100 show also listens to at least one of the tail-enders. So far, nobody has claimed more than 100,000 downloads per show so you don't need a super-computer to come up with a realistic estimate of the total number of podcast listeners in the world. It is not a mass audience.

But hold on to your knickers. In just a few weeks, Apple will unleash a veritable tidal wave of potential listeners on to the podcasting scene by releasing the first main-stream podcasting client in iTunes. There are probably about 20 million regular to semi-regular iTunes users (yeah, yeah I know they claim 38 million...) and this number dwarfs the size of the current audience. It also spells trouble because there may be a bandwidth rush that will cost some podcasters a lot of bucks. Get ready for this second wave because it will be the make or break stage for those of us that take podcasting seriously. Coursey maintains that the medium will become dominated by "professional content". I think he means content by professional broadcasters but there will be a very robust, yet small, market for podcasters that create content focused at professionals. A market of +20 million potential listeners with varied professional and personal tastes is much more attractive to advertisers than the current market of a million early adopters. At 20 million, podcasting may have enough "mass" to attract even larger audiences. Portable device listening should be able to easily out-strip goofy and expensive technologies like satellite radio.