They say that everything old is new again, and if you are looking for evidence to support that claim, look no further than podcasts.
Those of you old enough to remember a pre-iPhone world will recall how Apple’s hippest product at that stage was the iPod, a sleek hand-held device that – as the slogan went – put 1,000 songs in your pocket.
As well as 1,000 songs (that you would need to transfer from CD to computer to iPod), the iPod also ushered in the podcast era (that’s where the name podcast came from), back in 2004 when journalist Ben Hammersley came up with the term, a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast.
While podcasting became popular, it was still relatively niche, both because the means to produce them weren’t as accessible, and because listening to them on your device still entailed a highly manual process of downloading them from your computer to your iPod (or whatever other MP3 player you were using).
And don’t forget, this was also pre-Apple car play, so the ability to seamlessly listen to podcasts while driving didn’t exist either.
We will call this the podcast 1.0 era.
The podcast 2.0 era arguably began in around 2014, when narrative podcasts – especially true crime shows – first found their way into popular culture. The true-crime genre was born in October 2014, with the launch of the show Serial (the first podcast to win a prestigious Peabody Award for story telling). Today, true-crime remains one of the most popular categories of podcast in Australia – especially with female listeners – although as a category it is still eclipsed by news and politics, sports, and comedy (more on that later).
Since 2014, growth in podcast listening has been off the charts.
The world loves podcasts. Australians doubly so.
Estimates put the number of podcast listeners at a shade over half a billion, tuning into more than 170 million individual episodes across various genres.
In the US, over 100 million people – one third of the population – listen to podcasts.
But in Australia, we have taken our love of podcasts to new levels.
According to Edison Research, Australia is the world leader in podcast consumption, with around 43% of Australians aged 12 and over listening to podcasts on a regular or semi-regular basis.
This has almost doubled over the last 5 years – a big boost in listenership coming during those dark days of Covid when we were locked down.
To the extent that podcasts now rival other electronic media in terms of penetration and popularity (and thus marketing effectiveness) I thought it was worth sharing a range of statistics about podcasts.
Top 10 Australian podcast statistics
- 43% – Australians over 12 listening to podcasts
- Overall, 35% of these are listening at least once per week (16% are listening daily)
- While there is certainly a younger skew in listeners, 22% of 45–54-year-olds are listening daily and 20% weekly
- 66% – expected proportion of Australians listening to podcasts by 2030
- Top 10 genres include music (29%), news and politics (17%), comedy (14%), and sport (11%) with science and true crime round out the Top 10 at 10% each
- Females are much bigger fans of true crime podcasts (13% versus 8%), whereas sports is 17% of males versus 4% of females
- The top apps for listening to podcasts are Spotify (24%) and YouTube (21%)
- 980 – total podcast episodes published by Ensombl (including 452 episodes of the Ensombl Australia podcast, 285 thematic series episodes, and 90 episodes of our AdviceTech series).
- 800,000 – approx total downloads of Ensombl podcasts
- 20x – the factor by which Ensombl podcasts outperform other Australian financial planning podcasts, based on download numbers (Source: CastBox July 2024).
The Ensombl podcast goes from strength to strength
You will have noticed I managed to sneak in some Ensombl-specific podcast stats at the end there, and why not?
When it comes to podcasts produced for financial advisors, nothing else comes close in terms of download numbers. Our flagship Ensombl Australia podcast (up to episode 453 at the time of writing) is without question the most downloaded podcast for Australian financial advisors across the market. (A key driver of its success being that the host, and the majority of guests are themselves financial advisors).
Across this and our other regular series, (The Engine Room business growth series, the Investment Podcast) we regularly see monthly downloads exceed 10,000.
For advertisers, podcasts deliver in spades – and not just for consume brands. One recent study by Sapio Research estimated that 43% of business decision-makers are now using podcasts to access business-related content.
Advertising within podcasts has been shown to be incredibly effective, with a Nielsen study finding that nearly 70% of respondents exposed to podcast advertising agreed it had increased their awareness of new products and services.
A staggering 62% of them also correctly recalled the brand advertised in the podcast being tested – making them the perfect channel to drive awareness and launch new products.
We’ve helped many challenger brands establish a brand footprint with advisors through our podcast offerings (both on a standalone basis and in conjunction with our other content assets).
As Kristine Brooks, Milford’s Chief Country Officer for Australia, put it:
“Our Monday morning Market Insights podcast has already had 30k
downloads and has almost singlehandedly accelerated awareness of our brand and proposition.”.
To find out more about the conversations Australian advisors are talking about, and the channels they are preferring to use, reach out, we’d love to share the insights gathered across the nearly 9,000 users of the Ensombl platform.
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