NEW YORK—According to a recent eMarketer forecast, almost 40 percent of the U.S. digital audio listening population will be listening to podcasts by 2023. This would represent 85.4 million people in the United States, which compares with 76.4 million podcast listeners in 2019, according to the research firm.

Many U.S. podcast listeners tune in frequently, and three in 10 daily listeners have bought products based on podcast ads, eMarketer noted in a recent post, citing data from the research firm CivicScience.

The firm’s September 2019 survey found that nearly one-third of U.S. podcast listeners tune in daily, and a similar figure listens weekly. In addition, the study found a difference in purchasing patterns between the two listening groups. Thirty percent of daily listeners ages 13 and older said they had purchased an item after hearing a sponsored ad for it. One in five weekly listeners did the same, according to eMarketer.

“People find resonance with podcasts, and they want to talk about [them] a lot,” Alex Kubo, a vice president of e-commerce and digital marketing at furniture company Burrow, told eMarketer. “Podcasts [can] grab somebody's attention and walk them all the way down the funnel.”

According to eMarketer, advertisers see important value in targeting the highly engaged audience of podcast listeners, and these advertisers are frequently “making podcast ads a part of their larger digital audio buys, particularly host-read ads. Industry groups estimated in mid-2019 that ad revenues attributed to podcasts would pass the $1 billion mark by 2021.

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