According to Edison’s Infinite Dial 2019 report released last week in partnership with Triton Digital, 70% of the US population is familiar with podcasting, up 6% from last year.
Since Edison’s stats are based on U.S. figures, we wanted to add some worldwide insights to the conversation, pulling demographic data from our global network to make comparisons. Based on usage stats from February 2018 and February 2019, we broke the data down based on podcast listening by gender and listening by age to illustrate our angle on the subject.
We found that there’s actually a lot of similarity between our data and Edison Research’s, particularly for the 2019 metrics that both show nearly the exact the same gender balance, highlighting how popular the medium is becoming not only in the States but across the world.
However, the split in 2018 looks a bit more uneven. Last year, we found growth in podcast listening among women had been picking up speed. But Edison’s data was slightly different. In their research, the proportion of women was actually higher in 2018 than in 2019.
Once we began comparing numbers, we thought we’d also take a look at the breakdown of podcast listening by age. When looking at the gender split, podcast listening takes a turn when looking at age groups. 2019 might be the year of the woman, with listening jumping from 41.5% to 44.9% for women, while decreasing from 58.5% to 55.51% for men. Females aged between 55-64 and over 65 have been listening to more podcasts than males in the same age groups. This likely is due to more content being published for a female audience, as shows focused on genres such as true crime surge in popularity.
Looking at age groups from 2019 to 2018, listeners over 65 have increased, as did those between 25-34 and 35-44 years old. Baby boomers and Gen Xers are dominating the podcast industry. If this isn’t proof that the pivot to audio continues, and if you aren’t podcasting now, perhaps you should be.