Announcing: Podcast Demographics
by Dave Zohrob · May 04, 2021

We're pleased to announce Chartable Demographics for publishers, available today to all publishers on our Pro and Enterprise plans. 

Publishers can now see household-level demographics about their podcasts across four categories—gender, age, education, and income—right in their Chartable dashboard. Here's why we built the feature, and why we think it's important:

The perennial question: Who's listening?

Every podcaster has asked themselves at some point: who's listening to my podcast? The usual answer till now has been listener surveys. These surveys are are useful, but require time and money to run.

Chartable Demographics help you understand your audience quickly—no surveys required.

Our demographic data comes from our partnership with Epsilon, who have the #1-ranked consumer database in the industry and have been in the business for 40+ years. Here's what it looks like on your dashboard:

example

These stats are for our own podcast, but you'll see stats for your shows when you log into your dashboard. Reading the above chart, we can see that our podcast indexes significantly above average for college-educated households.

Why demographics?

Demographics allow podcasters to make smarter decisions marketing their shows and selling ads. The best way to market your shows is to find your audience where they already are—for podcasters that is, of course, on other podcasts! Advertising on shows with a close demographic match has a higher chance of yielding success.

When selling ads on your shows, you're on the other end of that same transaction. Advertisers want to know the demographics of your show because they also want to find the correct audience that aligns with the product they're selling.

Demographic Benchmarks

Your audience doesn't exist in a vacuum—that's why we're including comparisons to industry-wide demographic benchmarks, right alongside your own. Knowing how your show fits into the larger ecosystem helps you contextualize your audience, both for your own use and for advertisers.

Because our stats are only available at a household level, some demographics like age and gender are only shown as indexes against the industry benchmark:

example by index

Reading the above chart, you can see that our podcast indexes significantly above average in the 25-34 segment, and below average in older age segments.

Benchmarks by genre

Overall, we've found some key demographic trends in the podcast audience:

  • Podcast listeners tend to have significantly higher household incomes than the US average
  • Podcast listeners tend to be significantly more educated than the US average

Although every genre of podcast measures above the US average in terms of education and income, some genres rank higher than others. When you're considering where to advertise to grow your audience, you're likely to have a higher conversion rate if you target shows in genres that rank similarly to yours.

Here are benchmarks by genre across all Chartable-enabled podcasts. The methodology is as follows:

  • Household Income is ranked on average household income of the audience
  • College Education is ranked on the % of audience who has completed a bachelor's degree or greater (i.e. graduate degrees are included)

You can click on a column header to change the ranking:

It's perhaps not surprising that business and government podcasts rank highly in terms of income and education. And even though genres like Arts rank less highly in terms of income, we'd like to emphasize that all genres index significantly higher than the US household average for both income and education.

The more you know

Our demographics for the podcast industry show both the strength, and the potential, of the medium. Listeners tend to be wealthier and more well educated than the US median household, which is great news for advertisers.

We're very pleased to provide this data to publishers starting today. If you're not on a Pro plan yet, you can upgrade from your Chartable dashboard, or reach out via our support widget to speak to an account executive today. We can't wait to hear your feedback!

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