BBC on podcasting stats
By Mike DavisonInteresting examination of two recent pieces of research on podcasting – one the Forrester report on social computing (read the 1000heads review here) and the other a UK based study from BMRB.
Both studies differ slightly, with Forrester far more cautious in predicting podcast growth.
What is clear from the perspective of researchers as well as media producers like the BBC is that measuring podcast uptake is a tricky business. Although downloads can be tracked, nobody really knows how many people have gone on the listen to the files, or even pass them along.
This is the same for other standalone digital media which can be passed along virally. There are ways of tracking certain content (.mov files can contain embedded links users can click at the end of a video which then registers that ‘view’ with a server) but things get trickier when its a file viewed or listened to on a non internet enabled device like an iPod.
Still, the same applies offline as well. How many newspapers have you browsed while sitting on a train that you didn’t buy?
One (complimentary) approach we take to impact measurement of sources like podcasts is based upon positional indexing. The weighting takes into account the visibility of the media source and audience exposure rather than an explicit ‘listened to’ figure – which is impossible to determine in this technological climate.
Read the article here.
