Smart Speaker Owner Demographics Are Getting Younger as Market Nearly Tripled in 12 Months
Edison Research and NPR released their now annual Smart Audio Report for 2018 which takes an in-depth look at smart speaker owners and their use of the devices. One interesting change from the 2017 report is that younger consumers are catching up with their parents in terms of device ownership. According to Edison, 55+ consumers comprised 22% of smart speaker owners in May 2018 and the 25-34 age group made up 18%.
However, Edison also broke the market down into early adopter and early mainstream smart speaker owners. The early adopter category reflects consumers that have owned the device more than one-year and early mainstream less than one-year. From that data we can see that as of May 2017, 33% of smart speaker owners were 55+ while only 12% were 25-34.
Of those consumers that purchased a device in the past year, 19% were 55+ and 20% were 25-34. This data suggests that the technology adoption cycle was led by older adults and there is enough utility in the devices that younger adults are starting to catch up.
Market Grew by Almost 3x
Edison also reported that about 74% of smart speaker owners had acquired their device in the past year while 26% had owned a device for one year or more. That means the smart speaker ownership grew by 2.8 times in the 12 months between May 2017 and 2018.
This 2.8x growth imputes a total smart speaker ownership in May 2018 of about 20% based on their methodology given that Edison reported 7% ownership in May 2017. The figure closely tracks with Voicebot’s finding of 21.6% smart speaker ownership around the same time period. Edison has not reported smart speaker ownership numbers since a survey taken in December 2017 when it found that 18% market adoption, but a 2% rise over 5 months is a reasonable expectation.
You can access findings from the full report here.
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