Analysis: Odeo Traffic up 84% Year over Year; Leads Podcasting Sites

Authored by Hitwise on February 21, 2007 - 11:07am.

The following is a blog entry from LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise: 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.