A Forrester Research consumer poll found that 25 percent of online consumers expressed interest in podcasts, citing the ability to listen to programming on their own schedule. Just 1 percent of households, however, said they regularly listened to podcasts and only 2 percent had sampled them.
Trying to get hold of download statistics for podcasts is a relaly tricky job. Nobody except the beeb publishes them it seems. The BBC’s head of podcasting says:
In February, the latest month for which statistics are available, 1.7 million people downloaded BBC content. The Chris Moyles show on BBC Radio 1 is the most popular.
But that only tells the BBC how many files are downloaded. It does not say anything about the number of individuals or whether people are even listening to the files.
Setting up iTunes or iPodder to download podcasts is easy – adding them to an iPod is pretty easy, getting the time to listen to them all, now that’s tough.