The Nielsens of Podcasting?

We’re never going back to the days of the big three TV networks, in which the ranking of the networks was a much bigger part of pop culture. CBS ruled in the 1970s; ABC was in the basement for a long time. NBC’s woes have attracted attention in recent years, but its situation was still not dire.

In previous entries here, I’ve looked at how podcast audiences and success are measured. The podcast measurement and advertising services company Podtrac has launched a new ranking that aims to become a standard for the success of podcast networks in the way that Nielsen ratings measured TV networks.

The list ranks a top 10 of podcast outlets based on their monthly audience in the US and globally, but appears to be weighted to favor greater numbers in the US. This becomes more relevant in the bottom half of the list in which The Moth and Roman Mars (the owner of the 99% Invisible podcast) rank higher than the Nerdist and WBUR (Boston’s NPR station) because they have more US listeners, even though they have fewer listeners globally.

The top 5 of the list’s first edition, for April, have numbers that are consistent as they scale from US to global, but this certainly could be an issue anywhere in the list in the future. NPR currently is dominant at the top of the list, but the next three, This American Life, WNYC and HowStuffWorks, are close together in either US or global numbers, or both.

The list also has another obvious issue – comparing podcasting outlets that are very different in scope, scale and focus. CBS, which ranks fifth on the list, is drawing from the entire CBS TV News and CBS Radio operations for its material – plus CBS Sports, yielding 474 different shows that collectively have 1.5 million listeners. (Presumably Podtrac is referring to Play.it, which is how CBS branded its audio offerings last year).

This American Life, which ranks second, offers just that show and “Serial,” and has 5.6 million listeners. Even if you sloppily divide the number of shows by the number of listeners, This American Life and Serial have much more reach than all of CBS’s efforts. There’s also no indication given of just how small the listener  figures may be for some or many of the CBS shows, and how far above or below the average.

That means CBS should arguably be ranked way lower on this list, or maybe not at all. It’s possible that NBC, ABC, Fox or any number of media entities outside of network television, have individual podcasts or small handfuls of podcasts that reach more listeners than many or most CBS ones.

Perhaps other commentators out there have similar criticisms of Podtrac’s top 10 list, or other ones I haven’t considered. The point is that it’s too simple to go with the numbers Podtrac uses if you’re really going to measure a media company’s success in podcasting. Having one or two great shows with large audiences or a small roster of such shows could be worthy of greater advertiser support, which is the purpose of such a list. A “big three” TV network may not necessarily be a “big three” podcaster, if there really can be such a thing.

Web content marriage of equals: Pandora and podcasting

I had been writing this blog weekly, but took a forced hiatus the past two weeks or so, just because other responsibilities were taking over and because I was searching for a worthy idea to explore.

This entry will be a short one, but it’s an observation worth noting. The Pandora streaming audio service has made two very popular podcasts available – This American Life and its spinoff, Serial. But these are the only podcasts Pandora currently streams. It added stand-up comedy a few years ago, and that’s still most of, or the only, spoken word on the service. The browsing functionality has improved in its newest or newer versions, but there’s no visible category for podcasts – you have to already know those two shows are on there, to find them.

So how useful is this? According to Fast Company, Pandora has 78 million listeners and few of them subscribe to podcasts. In this story, John Paul Titlow theorizes that by going on Pandora, This American Life and Serial will reach many millions more listeners than they had through iTunes and other channels – even as very big hits in the podcast genre. I’m not sure how much that rings true or will bear out, if the Pandora interface continues to neglect promotion of these podcasts’ presence, or have any obvious indication that these shows are now there.

What does this even do for Pandora? It may not do much for the shows, for the aforementioned reason. Adding to Pandora’s success or quality depends on whether it plans to sign on many more podcasts and build a reputation as a destination for such content.

It’s curious that Titlow, writing for Fast Company, views Pandora as the “mainstream” and places podcasting outside that mainstream, even though Serial, as he notes, had 40 million downloads for its first season. That’s only one big hit podcast, but having that many millions for an audience means the programming or content is mainstream. If Pandora does go further with podcasts, we’re talking about giants joining forces, not a big fish swallowing up small fish.