Found out recently that iTunes now ranks podcasts by popularity and looked up Across the Sound, which I'm proud to say is the 15th most popular business/marketing podcast. What makes this even more special is the fact that when you take out/discount the MSM publishers like TIME or Ad Age, the corporate ones like Delloite and the less targeted (poorly categrorized) ones like 30 minutes of personal finance, ATS is well within the top 5.
I am also humbled and privileged to have 7x 5-star reviews on iTunes.
In addition, a great article from The Diffusion Group sheds new light on Podcasting, with the following insight:
According to a recent consumer survey conducted by Bridge Data, the relevance of portability to podcast usage has been vastly overstated. In fact, more 80% of podcast downloads never make it to a portable player or another device - they are consumed on the PC
The gist of the article relates to the very definition and meaning of the word, Podcasting as in iPod as in portable device and wonders whether we need perhaps to recast the word based on listening habits.
My takeaway is that the current numbers of listenership could very well be understated by a factor of 4-5x based on the ala carte downloaders versus RSS subscribers (which is the metric currently being used...at least by myself). And that's really what it comes down to: on one hand the innovator/early adopter, more tech-savvy audience (using RSS/iPods/iTunes etc) and on the other hand the rest of the world (using their PC's)
I can tell you anecdotally that the number of people I bump into periodically who listen to ATS is way too high to be only representative of the subset of subscribers as indicated in the Feedburner stats. Given the global representation as a proxy or percentage of total listeners, I can only imagine that the number is way higher...
Hat tips to MicroPersuasion
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