According to Google Search Insights, Oregonian (especially Portland Oregonians) love podcasts! I decided to find where in the country podcasting was most popular and to my surprise, Oregon came out on top! I did this by simply creating a search query for the entire US for the term “podcast” and bam! There is was, Oregon on top. I wanted to understand why, what makes podcasting to appealing to Oregonians? Is it the liberal politics or is it something related to connection that Social Media has with the West Coast? Lets find out.

To begin with, here is a graphical representation of the level of interest over the course of 6 years in 5 states, including Oregon. This graph by itself does not prove anything other than Oregonians are incredibly interested in podcasting when compared to other states. To see the data from Google Insights simply click here. To find out why Oregonians love podcasting so much I decided to use Google Sets to see what keywords were commonly being associated “Oregon” and “podcast”, therefore giving me a direction to head in. Here is what I found. I will come back to this in a minute.

In addition to the level of interest that Oregonians have in podcasting over the last 6 years, Google Insights gave me a list of popular search terms associated with “podcast”. Here they are:
These “top search terms” are the result of 6 years worth of collective searches made by Oregonians, but what about the search terms that have recently been on the rise? What are the searches Oregonians are doing more and more often within the last 3 years? The same time period of the largest percentage of consistent growth in overall interest in podcasting? Here they are:

Now we are getting somewhere. Putting these pieces together I can begin to see a trend developing, Oregonians truly do embrace local do-it-yourself (DIY) media. For example, in the past 3 years the local NPR affilaite’s, Oregon Public Broadcasting, show “Fresh Air” has had their podcast begin to grow to the point that it is competing with a nationally known podcast by Adam Carolla. This potentially tells me that the reason why podcasting is so interesting and popular among Oregonians, especially Portlandians, is because of the very nature of podcasting itself. It is amatuer, cheap, local and depends entirely on the host(s) to create the content.

So there you have it, Oregon loves podcasts. Well at least according to Google.

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