The "Long Tail"

I mention this because as a beginning podcaster in 2006 I'd hoped that the "long tail" would mean a faster exponential growth of the EP audience, as people got turned on to older shows. To my dismay I soon realized that downloads follow a quite predictable (and evidently normal) sequence: large volume on Fridays with the new show, slowing tapering off throughout the week. EP audience growth would have to come from something else. I figured that maybe podcasting didn't follow Anderson's model after all and so didn't think too much more about it, but was surprised to note Anderson's denouement.

By coincidence, the recent anti-Anderson story also helps make sense of one early finding from the 2008 EP Survey. (Remember, this is a non-scientific survey with self-selected respondents.) Compared to the past two years this year more of the EP podcast audience — considerably more — report that they download the show every week. And that is consistent, I think, with site logs which show an increase of Friday and weekend download volume relative to the remainder of the week. The explanation of the data being that more people are more interested in the latest podcast. At least to me that intuitively makes sense.

If I'm right, this is a very rough confirmation of the survey's results. As I'll explain in a subsequent post (soon) there are a couple others. So while I know — and you know — that the EP Survey is non-scientific I'm inclined to think, just as I have for past surveys, that although it's obviously far from exactly accurate it nevertheless reveals a not-unreasonable approximation of the actual population. In short, it's very interesting!