Neilsen/NetRatings has released a report on podcasting which has left a lot of prominent podcasters, myself included, scratching their heads and makes me wonder where they got their sample data from. A company in Cupertino by any chance?

For example, they claim that the primary browser for podcasters (not podcast listeners) is Safari. Now, I know that if I take TPN’s hosts as a sample, about 10% of them are Mac users. And if I look at our server logs for June 2006, I know that 83.7% of our audience are Windows users, compared to 9.1% using a Mac. So, although I admit my sample is also pretty small, it doesn’t correlate with Neilsen’s.

Frank Barnako spoke to the analyst behind the report and has picked up some other issues with it as well. But, as Frank says,

When firms like Nielsen/NetRatings and Forrester Research  pay attention to podcasts, that’s good.  By studying podcasting they’re saying, "There’s interest here. People willing to pay for our reports want to know what’s going on."