In February, YouGov released a report called Podcast Bingers, detailing the habits of U.K. podcast listeners.
Additionally, the report focussed on the listeners attitudes to advertising (I’m sure we all have our opinions on how many times you want to hear a Hello Fresh voicer in a half hour show!)
The report noticed that listeners who listen to podcasts for more than 6 hours a week has doubled since 2023. However, as someone who designs, mixes and edits podcasts, the reports definition of ‘listen’ is a bit sad. If you listen to something with out any conscious thought, without actually interacting with the audio because you are busy doing something else (like me listening to music while I write this) are you actually listening to it? Listening to music while you do house hold chores or while running errands is one thing, but listening to a podcast, which is spoken word and requires a level of listening to appreciate it, is that actually listening?
Here’s a couple of the activities I would suggest cannot really be a podcast listener really listening to a show, and yet are detailed in the report:
- Doing household chores such as tidying up or doing the dishes.
- Running errands such as going to the bank or paying bills.
Unsurprisingly, 42% of listeners stated that they skip the ads, which is impressive when your hands are covered in the remnants of last nights failed chicken masala.
The top three genres of podcasts were:
- 36% – Comedy
- 25% – Music
- 24% – Sports
My question here then is, why are there SO many true crime podcasts, when on they only came in with a 20% share? Do we just like gore and horrific stories in stereo?
In comparing radio listeners to podcast listeners, the survey found, surprisingly possibly, that radio listeners still surpass their digital counterparts by a significant margin across all employment statuses, except the retired! 59% of full time workers favoured radio, whereas more than double the amount of retirees were podcast listener and additionally, four times as many people aged 55+, listened to podcasts.
Some of the findings in the report, such as the latter, were, to me a least pretty surprising. It will be interesting to see how these figures shift as the population gets older and the UK podcast industry matures.
To read the full report visit YouGov here: https://business.yougov.com/content/48186-podcast-bingers-in-the-uk