New Research shows Podcasting delivers an attractive, growing listenership in Canada
New insights are now available from the 2020 Canadian Podcast Listener report - the most comprehensive annual survey about podcast listening behaviours in Canada.
It's essential reading for anyone interested in understanding who listens to podcasts in Canada, what they listen to, why and how they listen, and how these patterns trend over time. Agencies, brands, broadcasters, podcast networks and indie producers are all invested in this immersive, growing medium.
The survey of 4,600+ Canadians, now in its fourth year, is co-published by Signal Hill Insights and myself (Jeff Ulster), with support from The Podcast Exchange (TPX). The full report contains more than 110 slides, and is offered to paid subscribers only, but we always publish a free summary report to help set a baseline of understanding across the country. How do we know there's interest beyond subscribers like broadcasters and agencies? In the last year alone, the 2019 free summary report was downloaded more than 1,400 times - a staggering number that took all of us by surprise. Lots of buzz about podcasting!
Every year, new stories emerge from the data that help us understand the role of podcasting in Canada a little better. Without going too far down the rabbit hole, here's a sneak peek at some of the highlights of the study that we are pleased to share widely:
Podcast listening continues to grow in Canada, and it's pandemic-proof.
Monthly listening among English-speaking Canadians has reached 30%, up from 25% three years ago. The national average is now 27%, due to the lower incidence of Francophone podcast listening (17%).
Francophones who do listen regularly are digging in, however - their past week listening is up to 12% (from 9%) since 2017.
Listening remains strongest in major cities. There's less listening in Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
Weekly listeners are spending more time listening to podcasts, listening to more episodes every week than they were last year. COVID changed some of their content choices and patterns, but consumption continues to trend up.
Podcast listeners are unique and diverse, and are an attractive audience for brands.
As the Canadian podcast audience grows, it continues to deliver a young, well-educated, diverse and affluent target difficult to reach elsewhere.
Women now make up a larger part of the podcast audience, representing nearly half (48%) of monthly podcast listeners. They're also more likely to be new listeners.
Podcast listeners are very receptive to brand messages. They love host-read ads, and they are less likely to avoid a podcast ad than an ad delivered via any other media.
Spotify continues its rapid ascent as a podcast platform.
Spotify has spent close to $1 billion USD in podcasting in the last couple of years, acquiring exclusive content, technology, developing monetization tools and enhancing the user experience.
Spotify is now effectively tied with Apple and YouTube as the place where listeners most often access podcasts in Canada, but Apple still leads with listeners who spend the most time with podcasts.
Spotify has made big strides among younger and newer listeners, but its podcast consumers tend to be less educated and have a lower household income than listeners that use Apple Podcasts most often.
There's so much more to the study than these highlights, including a particularly unique and valuable component we call the Canadian Podcast Chart. We asked the 1,618 monthly podcast listeners in our panel to name up to 10 podcasts they listened to in the last month. The result is a list of podcasts more than 2,800 titles long. We've developed an online dashboard for subscribers, to help them work with the list by genre, demo, publisher and other relevant data points.
One more little insight in that regard - Canadians do listen to Canadian podcasts! Twenty-two of the Top 60 podcasts in the 2020 list are made in Canada.
To download the most recent free report, read some of our earlier insights, and to learn how to subscribe to the full, paid report - visit the Canadian Podcast Listener website for all the details.
If your company is interested in getting involved in podcasting, please reach out to us at TPX. We offer an array of services to meet your podcasting needs:
TPX Studios - Backed by a team of award-winning writers and producers, TPX Studios offers forward-thinking companies an opportunity to speak with a new voice. At TPX Studios our focus is three-fold: Branded Podcasts for clients seeking deeper engagement with their customers; Enterprise Podcasts for companies looking to foster greater cohesion throughout their organization; and Consulting for organizations looking to explore, launch or optimize their podcast strategies.
TPX Sales - Looking to get your brand's message out to that attractive, hard-to-reach audience of Canadian podcast listeners? We can help you deliver a podcast ad campaign effectively and efficiently, thanks to our inventory of thousands of premium domestic and international podcasts that we exclusively represent in Canada. We can help your brand create host-read ads, targeting the audience you're after by curating content to match your need. We can deliver attribution tracking to demonstrate ROI, along with other reporting. For non-direct sales, we do offer programmatic buying as well, powered by Triton.
Do you like keeping up on what’s going on in podcasting in Canada and around the world? The Podcast Exchange wants to bring that right to your email inbox. We’d love for you to have a look at our newsletter, and share your feedback with us.
Each month the newsletter features the TPX blog of the month, the must-read headlines about the podcast industry and some insights about podcast listening from the latest research. We also offer intermittent updates with new and trending podcasts from the podcast publishers we represent.
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