April 10, 2006

In case you haven't seen it, Forrester analyst Charlene Li recently published some interesting stats/comments on podcasting. To summarize some of the highlights from her blog/report:

• Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use. One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels.
• [Forrester's] survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content.
• Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. Just to give you some context, Forrester expects MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the US this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices.
  

Charlene concludes, "So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists -- such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. My caution is that companies shouldn't be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience -- unless they gain value from being seen as innovative."

Fortunately, Marqui absolutely sees value in being innovative -- isn't that what marketing is about? And we don't think podcasts have to be some massively expensive undertaking to be compelling. To that end, we will be rolling out some MarquiCasts pretty soon. (We'll document the process too, in case folks are interested in how we did it.)

Posted by at April 10, 2006

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