I was in the rare circumstance of being without my iPod during my commute the other day. I decided to flip on the radio for a change. What I heard coming out of my car stereo was so foreign, and frankly so fowl, that I almost couldn’t believe my ears.

Did I used to listen to this many commercials? How could anyone put up with this stuff today now that podcasts are so easy to get?! I really was shocked. If you gave up radio a long time ago in favor of your iPod, I would encourage you to go back to radio for just an hour or so. It’s utterly suffocating.

I was so moved by this experience that I decided I would do a little experiment. I wanted to see exactly how much the radio was “jipping” us out of the real content that we tuned in for in the first place.

Let me say up front that I’m no scientist and this hardly qualifies as a true experiment, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I basically listened to an hour of radio and an hour of a podcast and took detailed track of several segments:

1. How much time was I hearing the actual program I tuned in to hear or at least content that was interesting me? (not a commercial, etc.)
2. How much time was spent listening to commercials?
3. How much time did I spend searching around trying to find something better during lulls in my program?

Here are my records:

For these next two, I dissected the actual time that I was getting real “broadcast” as opposed to commercials. I considered something to be “on-topic” if they basically stuck to the spirit of the program. A particular sports radio show I listened to contained several tangents between the on-air talent having nothing to do with sports.

As you might guess, the podcast was much more on-topic.

These radio numbers might not look so bad, but remember; the radio only gave me 33 minutes of real broadcast time in the first place.  In the end, I look at this and say:

How can radio ever hope to compete with these numbers?!?!?!  It surely will only get worse.  Podcasts are simply a much more efficient use of my time.  I have no doubt that more folks around the globe are waking up to this fact daily.