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How many people listen or watch stand up comedy in he US
Hello. Thank you for contacting Wonder about the number of people who listen to or watch stand-up comedy in the United States. Identifying unique users is a challenge in this industry due to the overlap in attendance, purchase, listening and viewing behaviors. That said, the audience is at least 17 million, based on the number of people who visited comedy clubs in 2016. I provide more detail below:
METHODOLOGY
I began by searching for articles about the most popular streaming stand-up comedy sites, applications, festivals and albums on the market. I next looked into subscriber numbers, download statistics and attendance records that were available.
RESULTS
Although we can estimate that there are more than 17 million unique consumers of stand-up, we cannot determine an exact breakdown of the total audience number because of audience overlap among the categories, like video services, audio services, etc. Simply adding all the audience data together for these groups would inflate the total because of the crossover involved. But there are subsets of the categories that are important to call out:
LIVE COMEDY - CLUBS
According to Statistica, 17 million people visited comedy clubs in 2016. The industry growth is attributed to stand-up shows at 1,000-seat theater venues. Up from a half dozen 15 years ago, today there are about 75 stand-up comedy acts who can sell out 1000- to 5000-seat clubs in the United States. A site called the Seat Geek lists 376 venues that fall into this occupancy range. Together these venues offer 900,960 seats.
LIVE COMEDY - TOURS (LARGE ARENA SHOWS)
The same challenge exists when looking at audience size for the Top 10 stand-up comedy tours. Attendance for these 2014 tours totals 142,771, but most of the performers only had one performance. And, Billboard magazine says large-area shows are not what is driving the growth.
TELEVISION
An October 2015 stand-up comedy show by Jeff Dunham garnered 7 million viewers. His performance is on the high end of the audience spectrum. About 5 percent of the U.S. televisions turned on at the time of the show. Billboard magazine estimates the live comedy industry generates about $300 million each year.
YOUTUBE
YouTube Comedy Central has 5,280,645 subscribers, but a subset of who watches the stand-up comedy section of the site is not available. Stand Up! has 25,205 subscribers, but the brand also has a Roku Channel. Rooftop Comedy has 24,370 subscribers on YouTube and Effin Funny has 18,857. There is no publicly available data showing how many subscribers among this group are from the United States versus International.
LAUGHLY
Laughly launched in August 2016 and is designed to offer on-demand stand-up comedy for listeners. The app been installed more than 50,000 times through the Apple App Store.
COMEDY FESTIVALS
There are more than a hundred festivals around the county that showcase stand-up comedians. Some popular options include SXSW Comedy, Gilda's LaughFest, Austin SketchFest, the Del Close Marathon, The Big-Little Comedy Fest, the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, the Brooklyn Comedy Festival (BKCF), Laugh Your Asheville Off, The Barbary Comedy & Improv, The Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival, and The Out of Bounds Comedy Festival.
Some sample attendance numbers include The Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival in 2013, which sold 20,000 tickets and played on 15 different dates. Another is Gilda's LaughFest, which In 2015, was attended by more than 45,000 and included 270 events. If we took an average of 30,000 attendees for the Top 20 festivals the total audience number would be 600,000.
ALBUMS
The 10 best-selling comedy albums sold 16,944,000 copies between 1991 and 2014. This information is not subdivided into U.S. buyers, or those who purchased more than one of the Top 10 albums. That's an average of 736,695 a year.
PODCASTS
Between September 2009 and December 2014, shows from the popular stand-up podcast WTF were downloaded more than 100 million times. That's 7,142, 857 downloads a year.
ADDING THINGS UP:
Determining a total unique number is a challenge for the reasons I indicated above -- audience cross-over and limited availability of audience data. We do know that at least 17 million people visited comedy clubs in 2016. We know that for some of these folks this might be the only stand-up "event" they attend. But how many people who go to comedy clubs also attend comedy festivals? Do those who listen to podcasts also watch stand-up on television? We cannot add up the numbers for each category without falsely inflating the total number.
CONCLUSION
Determining unique users (or audience members) is not possible due to a) the limited audience information available b) the cross-over users among the overall market c) the international nature of technology and lack of access to individual Web site analytics. Given the statistics currently available, however, the estimated audience size for stand-up comedy is more than 17 million.
Thank you for using Wonder. I hope the information we were able to locate proves helpful. Please let us know if you have additional research requests.