A new report from Nielsen/NetRatings gives some interesting demographics of podcast listeners. Generalizations aside, the report has some interesting results:
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51.6% of people who listen to podcasts pay their bills online. But, podcasting is not yet nearly as popular as viewing and paying bills online, 51.6 percent, or online job hunting, 24.6 percent. 24.6% have participated in online job searches.
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6.6% of adults have downloaded a podcast and the the 18-24 age range is twice as likely as the average adult to download podcasts.
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Apple users are more likely to download podcasts as Windows users. Audio and video podcasters are over three times as likely as the average Web user to use Apple’s Safari as their primary Internet browser.
Is Apple the platform of choice for the Web 2.0 generation?
To answer your question quite simply, there is no correlation.
Safari only owns 2.5% of the market. If that 2.5% of the market is 3 times more likely to podcast, it’s still a very tiny percentage of the overall market. (The actual count will be higher as well since many Apple users utilize Mozilla).
Apple sold about 1.5 million Macs and over 10 million IPods in 2005. It’s safe to say that the majority of IPod users are Windows users. Of course it doesn’t take an IPod or any portable device to open a Podcast.
I would also add that Web 2.0 doesn’t really play a role with IPod, Apple, Microsoft, etc. It has more to do with internet usage and application development through the web rather than the old model of desktop software. I’m not sure there is any correlation… and I’m a little saddened at the very poor job that Nielsen did. I’m not sure that there is any conclusion to be drawn from their release.
That seems to be more and more common with Nielsen these days. They try to look at the Internet as if it’s simply another mass medium. It’s far from it.
Regards!
Doug
Apple has consistently under 3% market share. If Apple is the platform of choice for Web 2.0, then Web 2.0 is even more hype than we might have thought.