http://feeds.feedblitz.com/-/62492615/0/ibmaudioblogs.mp3

The results were quite surprising. Jeremy's first response when seeing them was, "That can't be right."

Careful verification showed that indeed, our experiment had worked more than we ever expected. The downloads of our audio content went up by over 60% (and in some cases doubled).

As a result, we've made a major change to our content publishing schedule.

In this post we talk about our test, why it worked and what change we made to our content to continue the growth trend.

Getting More Mileage from Your Content

"Why don't we do audio version of our blog posts and post some to the main podcast feed?" The idea came up during our usual Monday strategy meeting.

Surveys of our audience showed that they were much more drawn to audio content than to reading. The preference was to consume content on-the-go.

Our blog posts were getting traffic, but not nearly the traction that we get with our feature audio show.

We wanted to continue blogging to have the Google juice provided by fresh text content, but we hated thinking that a huge piece of our following never even saw our blog content.

And so the experiment started. Jeremy and I each chose a couple posts that we'd written and recorded an audio version.

These audio blogs, as we called them, didn't replace our feature show. Rather, they went out as additional bonus content. We released about one a week for a month.

Then we forgot about them.

The Truth is in the Numbers

Months later, Greg Hickman asked to see results from our experiment. He was preparing to share mobile strategies for his New Media Expo presentation.

And so I dug into the numbers. Here's what we found.



* The audio blogs got 60-100% more downloads than the feature podcast (wha?!)

* The audio blogs had ten times more downloads than the original blog post had unique visits



It was a double-take moment.

Content sent out on the same feed was getting downloaded and streamed MUCH more than our main show.

So why did it work so well? This is where it gets a little tricky. Because audio download traffic is difficult to track, it gets tough to know exactly why it worked so well. However, we have a solid theory.

The Download Multiplier

To explain the surprising results, we looked to two key pieces of info.

Factor #1: Attention Span is Plunging

We've already been living in an attention economy for over a decade. The advent of the Internet followed by high-speed Internet connections in our pockets had fractured our attention.

Studies show that the average attention span of an adult surfing the Internet is only getting smaller.

While more and more people are consuming podcasts year-over-year, the length of time that they listen to a podcast in one go seems to be getting shorter.

Keep in mind, this is general data across all podcast listeners. Results could vary depending on the show or topic.

Factor #2: Mobile Usage Has Exploded, But Data Plans are Still Limited

In the past several years, the adoption of mobile phones, particularly smartphones, with broadband connections has grown rapidly.

When we first started podcasting, podcast were consumed far more on a desktop computer or an MP3 player without data connection. Now, you can download and stream podcasts on the go, at will.

That said,