Podcasts - The New VHS?

I struggled with the conclusion of this blog. I am not against podcasts or progress or new platforms. It's more about collecting and saving content that I may get to later. For me...later never seems to happen.

Digital Clutter

I was sorting through some of our stuff. Actually, I was looking for things to toss and I came across some VHS tapes. None of them have been watched. It looks as if I will never watch them for two reasons.

1. I no longer have a player
2. I'm no longer interested.

I'll save one tape. I contains video of my son when he was two. The rest is just trash.

I recently read articles about the generational divide for public radio and NPR. So...are podcasts the saving grace? The line that stood out was that there is no way to measure if all those downloaded podcasts are actually being listened to. Time Spent Listening for radio can be measured, but there's no way to determined of listeners are actually listening the content on podcasts. 

This is an important issue when it comes to building audience and loyalty. Marketing and development becomes more effective when positive outcomes from a listeners perspective can be demonstrated to the potential funder or contributor. Money follows audience.

I'm curious. How many podcasts are just taking up space on your device? How many do you actually listen to? Is there a way this could be measured? Opened emails can be measured with an email service. Analytics can show information about time spent on a blog site and website. Even the number of clicks on a page can be measured. Once a podcast is downloaded, what happens to the podcast is not traceable. Wouldn't it be nice if we could track actual usage for podcasts?

No Critical Mass?

But, are the numbers big enough to really matter? Serial is considered a breakout hit for podcasts. There were over 40 million downloads. It is estimated that each episode was downloaded 3.4 million times. Unfortunately, most podcasts don't come anywhere close to those numbers. Compare that with the weekly cume of the public radio station I listen to most. WNPR has over 200,000 listeners weekly. The weekly cume for public radio is 30 million. That's an unduplicated cume. I'm not sure, but the unduplicated weekly cume for Serial was 3.4 million. Cume is not the critical number when it comes to funding...the core audience is. Perhaps, if we could figure out the podcast's core?

I think the question is moot. Podcast's may be suited for the younger demographics of public radio's potential audience, but they may not be suitable for broadcast. Radio works best when it has a consistent audience appeal. You can tune in anytime and get what you want. It does not work well as a venue for appointment listening. Podcasts are all about appointments (so were VHS tapes).  The best part is the technology allows the user to make the appointment. We can make certain aspects of public radio programming available for on-demand listening and use social media to try to create a viral buzz, but as with most podcasts, don't expect the response and buzz that was created by Serial.