Podcast revolution, one year in. Who is listening to podcasts in central Europe
Podcasting has almost gone mainstream in Slovakia, we conducted a big online survey to find out listening habits.
Exactly one year ago I wrote a blog titled How did we accidentally start a podcast revolution and hit one million downloads. It was a fairly bold statement, but the intention was honest — I was trying to tell the story of how podcasting got going in my country — Slovakia (central Europe).
Now, almost two years into our audio venture at SME.sk I can write for sure that podcasting is not going away and if anything it all has turned into an evolution, which is frankly a better outcome anyone could have hoped for.
Let me first recap a few occurences we have seen happening and I believe are interesting for other markets where podcasting is not a thing.
Later, I will describe the outcome of an online survey we conducted among more than 1800 podcast listeners here in central Europe (answers came from Slovakia, Czech republic, Austria, Hungary, also Poland). We were inspired by The Podcast Consumer 2019 report done Edison Research. Suprisingly, the results are not that different, but I will get to that.
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A year into the podcast revolution: What have we learned
Since launching podcasts we (me & my colleagues at SME.sk) have been transparent about how many poeple are listening. Podcasts were a new thing, our colleagues from different newsmedia in Slovakia didn't really believe in this weird audio venture of ours and so we tracked publicly how the listenership is growing.
Obviously, at the time, we didn’t know for how long it will grow. Well, it grew quite a bit, as you can see at the charts below.
When we started doing our first daily news podcast, there were maybe 5 to 10 original podcasts being produced in Slovakia (October, 2017). Looking at the landscape 20 months later, there are more than 100 Slovak podcasts and the number is growing steadily.
First, it was our collegues from other newspapers who joined, then commercial radios followed, after that some independet bloggers started podcasting, stand-up comics and finally even some of the most popular YouTubers in the country decided to try this podcasting thing.
Of course, with new producers, new audiences follow, because everyone brings a part of their core followership to the ecosystem. And we all know, once someone discovers and falls in love with podcasts, they want more.
Finally, there are more than 5 Slovak podcasts listeners can choose from. As I write later, looking at data, there is plenty room to grow.
Basically, what happened is (in my opinion) that once podcasting became at least a bit popular — less and less people ask what it is & more and more of them ask what do you recommend listening — it was easier to convince anyone to try this new thing.
Noone wants to be the first if there is a fairly big chance of failure. Also, noone wants to invest into a platform, where there is no audience and it's not growing, which was the case of Slovakia prior to 2017.
Quick stats / takeaways
- the daily news podcast has a core audience of roughly 20-thousand daily listeners (fun fact: to The Daily by NY Times, more than 2 mil. listen daily, which is roughly 0,6% of the population of USA; with our daily news podcast that would be 0,4% of the population of Slovakia, lookout The New York Times!)
- almost 100-thousand people tune in monthly
- SME.sk is producing now 10 different podcasts
- apart from the daily news podcasts, the others are published weekly (tried a daily science podcast, but not many were interested in this topic as a daily podcast, though it was worth a try)
- the second and third most popular regular shows are: a #history podcast and a #technology podcast
- had a Game of Thrones podcast during the last season of the TV show, even partnered with HBO, it was a huge success, many tuned in (therefore we will start shortly a new culture podcast on TV shows and movies)
- podcasts are earning money! & it is a growing revenue stream
- we see podcast listeners getting our digital subscription because of podcasts (SME.sk has a digital paywall, we track podcast conversions + they tell us, our proud they could support our production this way)
- 80% listen via podcasting apps (at the start more than 50% of all listens came from people listening via web audio player within an article)
Who is listening to podcasts in central Europe?
Data comes from an online survey mostly answered by Slovaks, though based on the replies we were able to determine that people answering are not only listening to our podcasts and live in countries around Slovakia = central Europe.
Below you can see the results of an unrepresentative survey, as we had no other was at the moment to get this data. Data collection took place in the beginning of April, more than 1800 people answered.
I wish we had some independent data source, unfortunately we don’t and so we were forced to conduct a survey on our own, so please take this as unrepresentative research data. (Hopefully, the Digital News Report 2019 will have data on podcasting from more countries then last year.)
Nonetheless, there are some trends we have seen in hard data and thanks to this survey we are now better able to understand some stats and know our listeners more closely.
Also, in the end of the survey we left an open feedback question and got more than 600 suggestions and really valuable feedback from our hardcore fans.
When you look at the results, some of the outcomes are somewhat similar to data you can see from US audiences (take the Podcast Consumer 2019 done by Edison Research)— podcast listeners are mostly young, well educated, highly engaged and have mostly higher income than the average monthly salary.
Only one third of surveyed replied they only listen to one podcast, the vast majority listens to 4 and more on a regular basis.
There is still a lot of work to be done and I really hope audio on demand takes off in other parts of the region as well.
Also, from 5 to 100 podcasts in Slovakia is a super growth in two years, but we still lack a true crime podcast, more lifestyle and sport shows, which are some of the very popular genres.
And of course, in Slovakia we still have the majority of the nation to convince that podcasts are for everyone and that they should be listening as well. Yep, it's still a long journey ahead.
If you liked this, you can follow me on Twitter as well at @davidtvrdon — I Tweet a lot about podcasting, journalism and stuff.
