Podcasting is clearly catching on.

A new report from Nielsen/NetRatings finds that 6.6% of all U.S. adults online have recently downloaded an audio podcast. This equates to 9.2 million podcast listeners.

For comparison, this figure surpasses those who publish blogs (4.8% of the U.S. adult online population) and online daters (3.9%).

Further, 4.0% -- or 5.6 million Web users -- were found to have recently downloaded a video podcast.

"We can expect to see podcasting become increasingly popular as portable content media players proliferate," Michael Lanz, an analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, said in a news release announcing the findings.

For those of us engaged in communications, this underscores the growing importance of podcasting as a distribution medium. I personally believe it is a great way to complement any news announcement or marketing campaign. (Our FKC Newsmaker Interviews service is designed to make this easy to do.)

There's still work to be done to promote podcasting, however. Podcast listening lags now-commonplace activities such as viewing and paying bills online (51.6%) and online job hunting, (24.6%), the report found.