You might have very atypical media use. I fit podcasts in by replacing other media use.

I was just looking at media use data in Germany† and people spend tons of time using different media: 242 minutes of TV (that’s four hours!), 191 minutes of radio, 83 minutes on the Internet, 23 minutes reading newspapers, 31 minutes listening to audio recordings, 22 minutes reading books and 6 minutes reading magazines. That’s minutes per day (numbers from 2012, Van Eimeren, Frees 2012).

Those who are younger (14–29) use media a bit less – but still quite a lot: 138 minutes TV, 146 minutes radio, 150 minutes Internet, 10 minutes newspapers, 72 minutes audio recordings, 30 minutes books and 4 minutes magazines.

So if people just forgo a little bit of TV use they will easily be able to fit in a weekly 1.5 hour podcast. If you look at the time when people use different media (radio use peaks in the morning at 7, probably when people are in the bathroom or on the way to work, TV use massively peaks around 8 in the evening, Internet use is pretty evenly spread throughout the day) you can also see that radio use is also a prime candidate for replacement by podcasts.

By the way, the data I was looking at can tell you very little about how people use podcasts, because in the general population very few do. Only two percent use audio podcasts at least once weekly.

—

† I’m sorry, but I’m too lazy to look up numbers for the US right now. The paper with the data from Germany is the one I have handy. As far as I remember the details of US media use are different but they are broadly similar (as would be expected for two similarly developed countries).

—

Source: Van Eimeren, Birgit; Frees, Beate (2012): 76 Prozent der Deutschen online – neue Nutzungssituationen durch mobile Endgeräte. In: Media Perspektiven 7–8/2012 (p. 362–379).