Back to blogging after a few days’ break, and something to chew on for the new year.
A few weeks ago I asked the ABC if it would release the figures on Radio National podcasting and broadcast audience numbers.
Sometimes you ask and you get. The ABC has released these figures.
So far as I know this is the first time that the breakdowns by program have been made public.
The reason I wanted the figures was to inform the debate about Radio National’s specialist offerings, and the impact of podcasting on audience demand and behaviour, and programming decisions.
When specialist programs were cut recently (most notably the Media Report and the Religion Report) we were told they were not among the most popular for podcasting.
Various other statements have been floating around as well (not necessarily from ABC management), including that scheduling in prime time is less important these days for specialist shows because so many people access them in their own time by downloading, rather than by listening to the broadcast.
So what do the figures show? I would welcome some help here with the number crunching, but what follows is my tentative observations and back of the envelope figuring.
The way the figures are presented make comparisons between podcast audiences and broadcast audiences difficult, because the podcast figures are given for the year to 7 December 2008, whereas broadcast audience numbers are in terms of average weekly reach. Nevertheless the raw figures reveal some interesting things.
First up, Philip Adams is Podcast King, with his Late Night Live program accounting for more than 17 per cent of the total number of downloads. Close on his heels is Life Matters, followed by RN Breakfast. These three “general interest” shows together make up more than 35 per cent of the total number of ABC podcasts.
Following these podcast queens come a raft of specialist shows, with the Science Show, All in the Mind and the Book Show the front-runners. Sure enough, the shows that have been cut – The Religion Report, the Media Report, the Ark, and Street Stories – come well down the list, with the Sports Factor running last.
Compare the broadcast audience figures. Here, news and current events are the most popular, with RN Breakfast the front runner by a substantial margin, followed by AM and PM. Life Matters is next most popular, and Phillip Adams is down the list a bit. This suggests to me that, as you would expect, “real time” listening is skewed towards stuff that doesn’t keep – news and current events.
Yet, and this surprises me, it seems that the podcast audience is not really a significant factor in audience reach for some of the specialist programs. I would have thought that high quality specialist content not easily accessible elsewhere would or should be much more popular for podcasters – that the podcast audience would be a high proportion of the total audience.
If we take the Religion Report, the broadcast version reaches 93,000 people a week (77,000 on first airing, and another 16,000 for the repeat).
Doing a bit of basic maths with the podcast figures, it would seem that an average of about 4,300 people podcast it each week. In other words,the podcast audience is around only five per cent of the broadcast audience. The pattern is similar for the Media Report and other specialist programs.
Why so low?
It must be acknowledged that this back of the envelope figuring is very limited. There may be cross over between the two audiences, and the podcast figures don’t reveal whether the podcasting is consistent through the year, or whether one or more particularly popular episodes account for most of it. As well, I am assuming the podcast figures do not include those who stream the program from the ABC website (I am checking with ABC management on this point).
Nor do we know if podcasting audiences are new consumers of RN’s wares, or merely old broadcast audiences accessing programs in ways more convenient for them.
Of course size of audience is not the whole of the story, nor necessarily the most important measure of success when it comes to specialist programming. As mass media declines, niche media will be where the most important and intersting things are happening. The measure of success here will be not audience size but intensity of audience engagement. The reaction of RN audiences when programs were cut would suggest that the specialist programs have been doing something right in this department. Yet why, if the audience is so engaged, do they not podcast the content more?
And there are some Radio National specialist programs for which podcasting is a much more significant part of their audience make-up. For example, running the same rough and ready calculator over All in Mind, I estimate that over 40 per cent if its audience are accessing the content by podcast. For Big Ideas, the figure is 23 per cent. In Conversation gets 56 per cent of its audience by podcasting. Are these programs better, more unique in some way? Comments welcome.
Tentatively I conlude that these figures suggest new delivery mechanisms do not in themselves constitute a new media strategy. If RN wants to make the most of new media, it will also have to think through new ways of developing the content, and engaging audiences.
I am sure this is not the final word. I would welcome some crowd sourcing here. ABC watchers, what do the figures tell you? What have I missed? What else should I ask for from the ABC in the way of information?
UPDATE: An ABC Insider in a position to know has provided me with the comment below. He does not wish to be named:
“Read your piece on RN’s audience figures and thought it good to point out several things.
The first is that it is problematic comparing the audience figures for a daily programme like RN Breakfast with a weekly specialist progamme like Religion Report. RN Breakfast airs for 2-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week. It’s audience ratings will always be larger than a 30 minute once a week specialist programme. Similarly, LNL airs for 60 minutes, four days a week.
The second point is that the “8.30″ programmes like Religion Report, Media Report and Law Report are podcast as a whole programme, while RN Breakfast is podcast in sections, so there are more separate podcasts to download which will of course increases podcast figures for that programme.
With regard to ratings overall, some programmes will always rate higher than others, but what is also important aside from sheer audience numbers is audience impact and influence. I would argue that Religion Report had a significant and influential audience despite having fewer listeners and podcasters than say Life Matters. Similarly, Lateline on ABC TV has a small dedicated audience (much smaller than the 7pm news) but it is arguably as influential (or perhaps at times more influential) than the 7pm ABC News.
What would be interesting to see is how the replacement programmes for Religion Report and SportsFactor rate as broadcast programmes and as podcasts.
3 Comments
Margaret, I don’t find the small numbers surprising. Listening to podcasts is still a fairly minority activity. I’m obsessed with it, but even an enthusiast like me can’t listen to a great deal each week for time reasons and with podcasting the competition for your listening hour is growing by the week. I listen to several programs from the BBC (including Melvyn Bragg’s marvelous program and Thinking Allowed) plus the Guardian’s weekly program and then there are the university offerings from places like Stanford, UChannel etc all of which offer access to fantastic public lectures. As you can quickly gather podcasting puts RN into an intense international competition and while it offers them opportunities to grow the audience for their programs it also puts its audience into play for many other providers.
The other aspect as always is the horrible state of broadband in this country I have Optus’ top personal cable offering and yet it is ‘capped’ at 20 gigs a month that sounds like a lot but as the parent of teenagers I can tell you that it can quickly be used up. So I tend to download the international stuff and listen to RN on the radio
On a slight tangent – my Optus broadband cable speed is not even fast enough to allow me to reliably use the ABC iView service – that’s disgraceful
Hi Margaret,
It may just be me (although I’ve tried it from a couple of different computers), but I can’t view the ABC figures you refer to – it seems to be an empty Crikey page.
Even without looking at those numbers though, one thing to bear in mind is that the way podcast stats are presented can also tend to exaggerate their numbers.
As I understand it, at least via iTunes, once you subscribe, you’re counted in the stats as an ongoing subscriber until the point at which you unsubscribe. You don’t just opt in to a single episode.
But I suspect I’m not alone in that I probably only ever get around to listening to perhaps half of the podcasts that have automatically been downloaded for me. Yet I suspect the numbers would suggest I listen every week.
Given that, I’d treat even the lowish ABC numbers with some caution.
Cheers,
Tim
Is anyone else having trouble seeing the figures? I have just checked and they seem to be there for me, and for a friend I got to look – let me know if anyone else is having trouble.
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