Research
- podcast research -
Researching different podcasts
The Behemoth
The Behemoth is a radio drama about 15 year old Madyson tells the story of the Behemoth. A large, lumbering beast that has emerged from the waters off of Cape Cod. As the Behemoth begins to walk across the country Madyson sees a chance to change her life.
This was an interesting podcast to research for my project as it was told in a very similar way in how I planned to tell mine. It was told in retrospect as if Madyson was telling the story to someone which is how I wanted mine to work (or at least in a similar way). I appreciated the sound design of The Behemoth as it added an extra sense of emersion, I will definitely think about how i can incorporate it into my radio drama.
Sound design
Introduces characters
Conflict
Podcast listener research
I created a google form to gather a consensus about peoples listening habits for podcasts. This was going to be helpful so i can gather an insight on trends that emerge. For example my audio drama i want to market towards 16-25 year olds so i'll look for the averages that have been voted for in terms of length, genre etc.
My research
is this research helpful?
The research i conducted has helpful applications as it gives me an overview of the kind of podcasts that people typically listen to and why. I broke down my research into several sections starting off with identity (age, gender etc.) before getting into the details of the podcasts they listen to...
Age
From the research i conducted i could see the the main demographic of people listening to podcasts was aged 16-18 holding a majority of 81.8%, 10-15 year olds holding 13.6 percent, and 18-25 year olds holding less than 5% and no data for over 25s. But this holds an issue. This research was conducted by sharing it with people who follow me on instagram. The majority of those are going to be people who are aged from around 14-21 which presents the issue of inaccuracy throughout my research.
Upon further inspection using already conducted research I noticed several different things. (It is worth considering that the research took in a wider range of ages) As on 2021 52% of 12-24-year-olds listened to podcasts, 48% of 25-54 and only 22% of 55+. This shows a majority
Gender
From my research, there seemed to be an even split between Men and Women who with 40.9% on both sides, and Non-binary holding an 18.2%. This is expected considering there is less non-binary people than Gender identifying people. The research from podcasting demographics didn't include Non-binary or trans people (make of that what you will) but it did show that as of 2021 44% of men listened to podcasts while only 37% of women listened to podcasts. This has it's own connotations which I have gone into below.
Social class
Now i didnt add a social class question to my research as i didn't think necessary however looking at other research i can see that listener ship is mainly dominated by the working to middle class with 58% of households earning <75K listen to podcasts compared to 13% of 75k-100k, 18% of 100-150k and only 11% of 150k+. Why could this be? The research gave no indication why this may be and I personally can't think of a valid reason.
Listening Retention and preferred platforms
From my research i could see that the average listenership was a split between 2 hours per week and <1 hours per week and decreased as the hours increased with 3 hours having 18.2%, 4 hours having 13.6%, and 5+ hours holding less than 5% of the vote. This research matches other research quite well so this sub-section i do consider useful and can conclude that most people listen to podcasts 1-3 hours a week.