Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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February 20, 2007
Odeo Traffic up 84% Year over Year; Leads Podcasting Sites
Odeo is looking for a buyer. I have been keeping track of traffic to podcasting sites since the trend began to take off in 2005, and unfortunately haven't had much to write about, as few of the various podcasting sites have gained much traction. It seems that most podcast searching and downloading is being done on iTunes or being downloaded directly from host websites. Odeo is the only vertical podcasting site that has emerged from the pack: it received 5X more traffic than its nearest competitor, PodcastAlley.com for the week ending 2/17/07, and achieved an overall rank of 14,982 in the Hitwise rankings. The market share of visits to Odeo was up 84% when comparing the week ending 2/17/07 vs the same week last year (week ending 2/18/06). Twitter, the site that Obvious Corp wants to focus on, is gaining traffic, but since it's a mobile solution, web traffic may not be the best indicator of success.
Just how popular is podcasting? The share of searches on individual terms like 'podcast' and 'podcasting' have not shown a significant upward trend over the past year, but the share of searches containing related podcasting terms has increased. Keyword breadth, or the share of unique search queries containing a term, for 'podcast' and 'podcasts' has increased by 43% and 18% respectively when comparing the week ending 2/17/07 vs the week ending 2/18/06. Still, there were only 311 unique terms containing 'podcast' and 103 terms containing 'podcasts' for the four weeks ending 2/17/07. In contrast, there were 12,686 terms containing 'mp3' in the same period, which demonstrates that podcasting has not yet come close to reaching critical mass.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 06:10 PM
Posted to Community
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Comments
The spike in observed Odeo visitors at the end of October is likely related to the management buyout announcement of October 25 and the formation of Obvious Corp.
Splicing the statistics a bit differently, it would seem that Odeo's year-on-year growth (84%) is about twice the sector interest growth evidenced by search activity (43%).
Posted by: Niall Kennedy at February 20, 2007 08:51 PM
LeeAnn,
Thanks for the post. Interesting to see the results.
What are some of the other podcasting sites that you are tracking traffic wise?
Are you looking at podcastpickle.com, libsyn.com, podshow.com or keithandthegirl.com
While the later is not a site about podcasting, it is the site for a podcast that gets a great deal of traffic.
I would love to see a break down on traffic for all of the podcasting sites you are tracking.
Regards,
Rob @ podCast411
Posted by: robert Walch at February 21, 2007 11:45 AM
Hi Rob,
Thanks for your comments. The sites I looked at other than Odeo and PodcastAlley were Podcastingnews.com, Podcast.net, Yahoo! Podcasts, Ipodder.org and Podcast Bunker. The other sites you listed, along with Podcast411, all received a smaller market share of visits than PodcastAlley during the past year.
LeeAnn
Posted by: LeeAnn Prescott at February 21, 2007 11:59 PM
Odd ... according to Google Trends the total search volume for the terms: podcast, podcasts, & podcasting are all dropping (http://www.google.com/trends?q=podcast%2C+podcasts%2C+podcasting).
Since the slope of the trendlines on your "Share of US Search" plot are generally upward (admittedly, with poor R-squared) it could indicate that:
1) Google Trend's world-wide data show that searches for podcast terms are dropping off more steeply outside of the US than they are growing in the US?
2) Total number of searches are down worldwide - so lower Google search volume for podcast terms still means represents a larger proportion of the US search market?
3) We shouldn't contrast US & world-wide search data directly?
Regardless, I don't think that Odeo represents a good investment for very many buyers right now. This is based on the indicators of Obvious putting Odeo up for sale, the shallow upward trend of podcast terms' US search share in Hitwise data, and Google Trend's indication that podcast terms are getting less attention.
Posted by: Mike Bijon at March 1, 2007 11:36 PM
LeeAnn -
Do you have any idea about the number of podcasts that are out there, and the growth rate of that?
Cheers
Tom Keller
Posted by: Tom at March 15, 2007 03:10 PM
Hi Tom,
As Hitwise currently only tracks web traffic, we do not have information on the number of podcasts. I am not aware of a service that tracks that information, although the folks at Odeo or Apple's iTunes probably have numbers that they may or may not be willing to share.
LeeAnn
Posted by: LeeAnn Prescott at March 15, 2007 04:35 PM
