Podcasting Listens A Lot Less White Than It Looks

A report from Nielsen shows diversity among US-based podcast listeners is skewing differently from the overall population, which brings implications, cautions, and opportunities for all of podcasting.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

There's a new report out by Nielsen published recently, shines a bit of a light on the demographic makeup of podcasting, at least here in the US of A. And the good news, at least I take it as good news, is that podcast listeners are much more diverse than the overall US-based population. Not kidding. Pretty exciting stuff. I'll have a link to the survey, the study that was published by Nielsen. It's called Podcasting Today, and it was published towards the end of February of 2021. And it showed a few things.

Now in the American population, basically it breaks down like this - 34% of adults in America identify themselves as non-white, 34% non-white. Same question to the podcast listeners, 41% non-white. So 34% all the way up to 41%. That's a really big number. And might sit differently the way you're thinking about the podcasting world.

We hear a lot about the overall whiteness of podcasting, but again, 41% of US podcast listeners check the not-a-white-person box, as opposed to 34% who check that box. Or I guess it was boxes cause there's more than one, obviously.

I'm going to read a quote from the article, the survey itself, and it says, "Across ethnic groups, Hispanics have gravitated to podcasts more than any other. As the reach among this group increased from 1.1 million in 2010 to 6.8 million in 2019, that represents a growth rate of six times, which is well above the four times rate of growth amongst whites."

Now, that's the same for the other groups. Well, similar for the other groups, I should say. Looking at Asian, Black, and people who checked the box that says "other," they're all growing at five X, where growth amongst white people, only four X.

Now, that's interesting for a lot of reasons, but I think it comes with a few implications. Well, two implications specifically, one for people who are producing podcasts, and one for those of us who produce podcasts who also listen to podcasts. Also, it comes with a caution and an opportunity as well.

Let's talk about the implications, first of all. As a producer, it means that our potential audience pool looks a lot different than what we see in our daily lives or what we're reading reports on how other media is consumed by different makeups of people. Now, that means we need to create content. We need to understand that there is an audience out there that looks differently than what we're assuming things look like.

They may want to hear, in fact, they probably do want to hear, very different tales. They want content that fits their makeup and with those growth numbers, it makes a lot of sense to make sure we're aiming content, we're aiming to create content that is as diverse as the overall listening audience in podcasting seems to be. That's one for the producer side.

As a listener of podcasts, who also happens to produce podcasts, but we're all listeners as well, right? It really means that we are going to be more exposed or more likely to be exposed to podcasts that are created for different ethnicities. It doesn't matter how we identify, how you identify because these other groups are growing fast amongst listeners that means people will get smart about this. Those producers will just follow the advice I just gave and start making different types of content or different content designed to reach a different audience. And that means we overall will just be exposed to it, which is a good thing.

I think we need to be accepting and understand that not everything is designed really for us, but really also maybe broaden our horizons to listen to some of the other content that might not have been created for someone who looks exactly like us.

So those are the implications. The caution I will say here is let's remember this data was about listenership. It was not about creators or even the creations. There were probably, well, I'm just going to say I'm relatively certain that we still skew awfully white in the production side of things and those bringing you the content. But this sort of survey shows that needs to change. And I will say it likely will change. At least from the independent voices will continue to support those growing audience differences, those differences in audience segmentation. I think it's a good start.

And the real opportunity here, for all of podcasting, is for us not to screw this up. You know, if you look at, if you ask, read surveys on the general population's perceptions of media and biases for their particular group, they kind of stink. But as we're seeing more, as our listenership of podcasting continues to diverge away from the US  population, we continue to stay quite diverse. We can fix that, or we can not fix that, we can avoid that in podcasting, as long as we continue to foster a sense of diversity, create content that fits a diverse audience, that sometimes is hyper-niche  and sometimes spans across the rep. Do it all.

We can protect podcasting, I hope. That's our opportunity to protect podcasting from those media bias perceptions that are pervasive throughout the rest of the world. You know, if we don't screw it up.

Now, the study in and of itself has a lot more information on it. It was really designed for advertisers to read cause it has some data in there which ties purchasing decisions based on audience consumption based on podcast listening consumption. So I highly recommend downloading the entire survey.

Again, it's linked in the episode details. And sharing it with your podcasting peers, or better yet, send them a link to this audio where I'm gushing about it, and then send them a link to the survey, as well. That's always nice. Spread the word of Podcast Pontifications, if you will.

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That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!