From morning radio shows to a podcast on the drive home, Edison Research says audio still plans a big role in the daily media diet. It says ad-support audio reaches 84% of Americans aged 13 and older each day. And among 18 to 34 year olds, who are far more digitally-focused and harder to reach for marketers regardless of media format, ad supported audio’s reach is nearly the same at 82%.
Edison says the numbers reflect the average daily reach, and over the course of a week or a month, the reach would naturally expand likely to “well above” 90% of all Americans, including younger consumers. That is inline with reach numbers Nielsen publishes for audio.
“A vast number of Americans listen to ad-supported audio every single day. Any advertiser looking to send its message far and wide, including to younger age groups, should be considering more investment in audio advertising,” it says in a blog post.
Edison earlier reported that Americans age 13 and older listen to an average of four hours and eleven minutes of audio every single day. That is essentially unchanged from the level of almost a decade ago. “This enormous amount of time spent is one foundational assertion as to why advertisers should be allocating more of their budgets to audio,” Edison says.
At the inception of Share of Ear in 2014, the U.S. population 13+ spent four hours and 17 minutes a day listening to all audio sources. Over the years audio listening dropped some, hitting a low of three hours and 44 minutes in 2020. The trend reversed in 2021 when daily time spent with audio increased back to over four hours.
Edison has also released a new ranking of the top 25 podcasts that listeners in the U.K. report they listened to during the third quarter of 2023. Similar to the U.S. ranking by Edion, Spotify’s The Joe Rogan Experience tops the list, followed by The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, and That Peter Crouch Podcast.
Unlike other show rankings from Podtrac or Triton Digital built from download data, Edison’s Podcast Metrics is based on consumer recall. It asks survey participants which shows they listened to in the past week. Edison’s Q3 U.K. ranker is derived from data collected from 2,326 weekly podcast consumers aged 15 and older. Participants indicate which podcasts they listened to in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic, and purchase-behavior information.
