Thursday 27th June: Podcast reach among UK adults hits all time high

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The latest research on the UK podcast market from Edison Research shows that our favourite audio format has firmly established itself as a leading media platform in the UK. What does that actually mean? Basically that more UK adults than ever are listening to podcasts.

The research shows that over two-thirds of people in the UK aged 18+ have listened to a podcast at least once. More interesting is the fact that 42% are monthly podcast listeners and 30% are weekly listeners.

Edison’s age data is also interesting. Younger adults are loyal listeners, with a majority of 18–34 year olds listening monthly and 41% weekly. About half of 35-54 year olds are monthly podcast listeners, with 34% listening weekly. Even the oldsters are listening in - 28% of those age 55+ listen monthly, up from 20% in 2023, and 18% listen weekly. Podcasts, Baby, Yeah!

Time dropped its paywall last June, joining a handful of news organisations that have put up and pulled down their paywall. So what happened? Adweek says advertising revenues went up, digital subscriptions went down. By dropping its paywall and positioning itself as a premium brand, Time is betting on the expansion of its direct advertising and sponsorship business to compensate for the 50,000+ digital subscriptions its lost. Probably an easier punt to take when your owners are billionaires.

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Jim Bilton says one of the key learnings from the mediafutures benchmarking project has been the need for publishers to take a more structured approach to content. In this piece for InPublishing he outlines a three step process that moves through content audit to an evaluation of the efficiency of your content creation and on to the effectiveness of your content distribution and marketing.

I think this is the first time I’ve shared an article from the leftist US magazine Jacobin. But maybe looking outside the media bubble every now and then is a good thing, especially if it’s highlighting the shocking environmental impact AI data centres are having. For example, adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could easily consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland. And you thought it was the killer robots that were going to wipe us out.

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