The Pew View of Podcasting

The 2015 Pew study on the State of the News Media just came out. It is an excellent tracking study with some significant nuggets.

39 of the top 50 news sites get more traffic from mobile than desktop. This shift has occurred rapidly and is a reminder of the importance of responsive design and effective mobile apps.
Newspapers continue to take a hit, but they aren't the only ones; cable news networks are down 8% in prime time. Maybe this changes in the upcoming election cycle?
Local TV news is up. Even network evening news is up.
Overall local digital ad revenue is up 14%. Local news media outlets are up in digital, but still getting clobbered. They share in little of that pie. In fact, print revenue is still about 6 times greater than digital. The pure play technology companies dominate. Facebook alone grabs 24% of local digital revenue.

And among the study’s top 5 takeaways is the growth in podcasting. While the study sites previously released Edison Research data, it also points to NPR’s 41% increase in downloads of their podcasts in 2014.

Overall podcast downloads, which is different than actual listening data, is at 2.5 billion. We have to get past download numbers and on to more robust listening metrics in this category.