Reposted from Burning Questions:

[A] promising indicator of the success of podcasting is its comparison to... The DVD. Back in 2000, the DVD format, just 3 years old at the time, was declared the most successful product launch in consumer electronics history, outselling the VCR five to one. ...the number of podcasts available online is tenfold that of DVD titles in nearly half the time.

PodNova says they're indexing 74,265 podcasts. FeedBurner claims to be publishing somewhere between 47,000 or more of those channels. More than half by my count.
What does this mean? Podcasts are mainstream, whether the mainstreamers realise it or not. Forrester research claims that podcasts are consumed by less than 1 percent of all internet households, but what was the adoption of braodband like in the past?

From TMCNet:

a new CEA study reveals that 43 million U.S. households now have broadband Internet access — in 1999, that figure was just two million.

The point is, podcasting is not going away. Actually, the number of podcasts and the subjects they cover are growing all the time. The pope and the Queen have iPods now, along with several members of congress. People are getting used to time-shifted on-demand content that they choose to consume, instead of what is broadcast over the air and cable. I am excited to be someone taking advantage of the opportunity this medium provides, and I am very hopeful about the possible payoff to my hard work. These statistics only make me more confident; today is a good day to be me.