PODTRAC LAUNCHES THE PODCAST INDUSTRY’S FIRST RANKINGS

PODTRAC’S ADVERTISING SERVICES ARE REBRANDED AS AUTHENTIC

NEW YORK, NY May 24, 2016 – Podtrac Inc., a leading podcast measurement and advertising company, today announced the company will divide its services and offer them under two separate brands:  Podtrac for independent audience measurement and analytics, and Authentic for podcast advertising services.

Podtrac announced the first Podcast Industry Audience Rankings a free monthly ranking of the top 10 podcast publishers by a new industry metric “US Unique Monthly Audience”  which quantifies monthly audience size by publisher across all shows and episodes they produce.   NPR, This American Life/Serial, WNYC Studios, and HowStuffWorks top the list that also includes TWiT.  Podtrac is measuring 90% of the top podcast publishers, and plans to have close to 100% participation in the weeks ahead.  The current ranking report covers 28 million unique monthly US listeners, 38.5 million global, and 169 million unique downloads.  The complete ranking is available at http://podtrac.com/industry-rankings.

As the podcast advertising industry has expanded rapidly over the past two years, there has been a growing need for an open podcast measurement and analytics service.  Podtrac has been a leader in podcast advertising and measurement, representing high-quality popular podcasts and advertisers, and measured and analyzed more than seven billion unique downloads across 10,000 of the most popular podcasts for 10 years.  Podtrac wrote the first white paper on podcast measurement in 2005 and has provided advertisers with the demographics data on thousands of podcasts to identify the shows that best meet their target demographic.

“Advertisers want to know the audience size and demographics of the top podcasts, and to understand the reach offered by publishers,” said Bryan Moffett, General Manager of National Public Media, the company that seeks corporate sponsorship for NPR. “With Podtrac’s monthly industry rankings and unique audience metrics, advertisers now have a view of not only the combined audience size across NPR’s many podcasts, but can compare our reach to other publishers to more accurately plan their podcast media buys.”

“The Podcast Industry Audience Rankings from Podtrac provides advertisers, for the first time, the same level of transparency for monthly podcast audience sizes that they have for all other types of digital media,” said Velvet Beard, VP of Podcast Analytics for Podtrac. “We expect even more shows, and invite all podcast publishers and podcast networks to use our free measurement service.”

“The report provides similar metrics to those comScore and Nielsen provide in their advertising planning tools for other media types,” said Mark McCrery, Founder and CEO of Podtrac and Authentic Advertising.  “With our advanced measurement system and analysis of over seven billion unique downloads tracked over 10 years, Podtrac is well positioned to offer the new audience metrics and rankings for podcasting to help the industry grow and be on a level playing field with all digital media.  Podtrac measurement is independent and measures thousands of shows from publishers who in some cases have their own ad or sponsorship sales groups such as NPR.”  

Historically advertisers have not had a metric that sizes audiences by show or publisher across all devices and apps.   Advertisers have had to rely on sub-optimal ways of estimating podcast audience sizes and popularity that don’t provide an apples-to-apples comparison.  For example, iTunes Top Podcasts ranking is based on recent podcast subscriptions, and an influx in traffic from Twitter can sometimes lead to a higher ranking in iTunes than podcasts with larger audiences.  Also, some podcast publishers self-report raw download counts which are not a measure of unique monthly audience size.  And other podcast publishers rely on unique analysis by episode, which is also not a measure of unique monthly audience size.

With Podtrac’s new metrics, advertisers and podcast publishers can now access the unique monthly reach of each podcast publisher across all the shows they produce to better inform their podcast advertising planning and content decisions.  Details of the Podtrac’s audience measurement methodology and metrics are available in two new white papers available on Podtrac.com:  Podtrac Measurement Methodology, and What Every Advertiser Needs to Know About Podcast Measurement.  

Authentic provides advertising services for podcasts and advertisers.  Authentic represents high-quality popular podcasts including This American Life, Serial, This Week in Tech, Alice Isn’t Dead, Psychobable with Tyler Oakley and Korey Kuhl and hundreds of other top podcasts. Ads are delivered in the tone and voice of each show to their highly-engaged audiences.  

Authentic’s ad services started in 2005 as Podtrac ad services working with more brands than any other podcast company.  Authentic will continue to leverage its years of learning to offer the most comprehensive ad services for the podcast industry.

For more information contact and visit the Podtrac and Authentic websites:
Podtrac (http://podtrac.com) for independent audience measurement and analytics
Authentic (http://authenticshows.com) for podcast advertising services

Julia Price
Phone:  415-647-9630
Mobile:  415-336-1075
Email:  jprice@podtrac.com