Flaws in Reporting on the Nielsen Study: More People Listen to Radio than Write Newspaper Columns

An interesting story line from ClickZ on a recent Nielsen report.

The title is Report: Downloading Podcasts more Popular than Blogging.

More people have downloaded a podcast lately than have published a blog or engage in online dating, according to a new study by Nielsen//NetRatings.

The study, based on data from its @Plan Summer 2006 release, found that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have downloaded an audio podcast in the past 30 days. It also found that 4.0 percent, or 5.6 million Web users, have recently downloaded a video podcast.

By comparison, Nielsen//NetRatings' data shows that 4.8 percent of the U.S. adult online population publish blogs, and 3.9 percent engage in online dating. Those activities still lag far behind online job hunting, at 24.6 percent, and paying bills online, at 51.6 percent.

There's one major problem that leaps out - downloading a podcast has nothing in common with publishing a blog. I struggle to come up with a comparison, but the best one I could think of was a headline that says,

More people listen to the radio than write newspaper columns.

The headline is misleading, meant to make the Nielsen study make comparisons it doesn't appear to make. Maybe my copy of the press release is the wrong one, but it should be clear that downloading podcasts is comparable to reading blogs. Creating podcasts is similar to publishing blogs.

I don't know if it's the editor, the writer, or someone else - but that's a terrible headline.

The pdf of the press release is available at the nielsen site under press releases.