Podtrac's ranking of the Top 20 Podcasts based on U.S. Unique Monthly Audience for March 2019 is now available at Podtrac.com.
Visit Podtrac.com to sign-up to receive monthly updates to Podtrac's Top 20 Podcasts and Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking reports.
Note: The Top 10 Publisher Ranking for March 2019 was updated on April 16, 2019 from a previous version. The updated version contains corrections to the number of shows credited to Wondery for March 2019 which in turn affected audience numbers and Wondery’s position on the ranking.
Seven of the Top 10 publishers showed increases in their US Unique Monthly Audience (UMA) over February with the largest increase coming from PRX (14%) with the merger of PRI shows.
Average US Unique Monthly Audience across the Top 10 publishers of 8.2 million is up slightly (1%) from February 2019 and up 43% from March of 2018.
With over 600,000 podcasts now available, and new shows being published weekly, we wondered……
What content is driving the imaginations of publishers and capturing the attention of listeners?
Turns out it’s Comedy, News & Politics and Society & Culture... by a long shot.
Podtrac took a look at February 2018 and February 2019 Podtrac data for shows in the 16 iTunes categories. We averaged the unique monthly audience of the top 20 shows in each category and did some comparisons. Here’s what we found:
Content Royalty
Comedy, News & Politics and Society & Culture made the top 3 in both years.
Each top 3 category has a top show average audience over 1.5 million listeners.
The 4th largest top show average audience (Business) - is just over half the audience of the # 3 category while the #5 category, Arts, is just ⅓ of the #3 category.
When ranked based on absolute overall average per show audience growth, the same three categories win, but News & Politics comes in #1, followed by Comedy and then Society & Culture.
Who’s Adding Listeners?
Religion & Spirituality had the largest percentage audience increase (though ranked 6th in absolute audience growth), followed by TV & Film (7th in absolute) and Comedy (2nd in absolute).
News & Politics had the largest absolute audience growth (while ranking 6th in percentage growth) followed by Comedy (3rd in percent growth) and Society & Culture (10th in percentage growth).
Sports & Recreation had the lowest percentage audience increase or 8% (13th in absolute audience growth) while ranking 6th in show growth (63%).
Who’s Adding Content?
Business had the largest percentage increase in number of shows in the category (77%), followed by Games & Hobbies (75%) and Health (71%).
News & Politics had the lowest percentage growth in new shows (40%) but the largest absolute growth in audience.
Here’s the February 2019 Category Ranking.
Podtrac's ranking of the Top 20 Podcasts based on U.S. Unique Monthly Audience for February 2019 is now available at Podtrac.com.
Visit Podtrac.com to sign-up to receive monthly updates to Podtrac's Top 20 Podcasts and Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking reports.
Nine of the Top 10 publishers showed increases in their US Unique Monthly Audience (UMA) over January with the biggest increases coming from The Daily Wire and Wondery — both at 17%.
Year-over-year, iHeart showed the greatest increase in US UMA (311%) reaping the benefits of the HSW acquisition and new programming, while Wondery had the second largest gain (155%) on the strength of new programming.
Average US Unique Monthly Audience across the Top 10 publishers of 8.1 million is up 6% from January 2019 and up 42% from February of 2018.
Last week we published our Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking for January without Global Unique Download numbers and asked for your feedback. In response to that feedback, we’re publishing a revised version of the ranking with the Global Unique Download numbers added back.
Five of the Top 10 publishers showed increases in their US Unique Monthly Audience with the biggest increases coming from The Daily Wire (19%) and iHeart (15%).
Average US Unique Monthly Audience across the Top 10 publishers of 7.7 million is flat from December and up 29% from January of 2018.
Total Global Downloads for the Top 10 Publishers increased by 15 % in January from December bouncing back from the year-end seasonal slump.
Total Global Downloads for the Top 10 Publishers is up 57% from January 2018.
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Podtrac's ranking of the Top 20 Podcasts based on U.S. Unique Monthly Audience for December 2018 is now available at Podtrac.com.
Visit Podtrac.com to sign-up to receive monthly updates to Podtrac's Top 20 Podcasts and Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking reports.
Just two of the Top 10 Publishers showed gains in their Unique US Monthly Audience in December over November: Barstool Sports (32%),and NPR (3%).
Total Global Downloads for the Top 10 Publishers overall decreased by 10 % in December from November following the trend from last month.
Total Global Downloads for the Top 10 Publishers is up 56% from December 2017.
