Edison Research Releases Podcast Industry’s First All-Inclusive Top 10 Podcast Ranker

Somerville NJ, USA—Edison Research is pleased to announce its first Top Ten Podcast ranker, new from the company’s subscription product, the Podcast Consumer Tracker (PCT). The ranker depicts the top ten podcasts in America by reach among weekly podcast consumers. The PCT is the only comprehensive and all-inclusive study of the reach of podcast networks and shows in America.

The top ten podcasts in America for the third and fourth quarters of 2019, as ranked by the percentage of weekly podcast consumers 18+ who have listened to them, is as follows:

1. The Joe Rogan Experience
2. This American Life
3. The Daily
4. My Favorite Murder
5. Crime Junkie
6. Stuff You Should Know
7. Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!
8. Serial
9. Pod Save America
10. Radiolab

Begun in Summer 2019, the PCT is now in its third quarter of fielding and is the only study that measures the entire podcast space continuously, compared to other download rankers which only measure participants/customers of those rankers, or users of a specific platform. As such, the PCT offers a holistic view of the reach and impact of all leading podcasts and podcast networks.

“This ranker looks deceptively simple,” notes Edison Senior Vice President Tom Webster, “but it’s the product of hand-coding tens of thousands of podcasts from a sample of over 4,000 podcast listeners. Podcast listening is still fairly fragmented, and it wasn’t until we had this large a sample that we felt it would be responsible to even put out a top ten, let alone a longer list.”

The PCT is sampled continuously throughout each quarter to negate the effects of limited releases and new shows and is weighted to the industry standard measure of podcast listening, the Infinite Dial research series from Edison Research and Triton Digital.

“Attempting to distill the listening habits of thousands of podcast listeners is a formidable research challenge, not to be entered into lightly, and certainly not by fielding a small sample study over a handful of days,” said Webster. “Fortunately for us, we had the mechanisms and methodology in place from other large sample projects, like our Share of Ear® series, to do the task justice and finally provide podcast networks, agencies, and media buyers with numbers they can trust and that can be projected across the entire listening population.”

How The Study Was Conducted:

The Podcast Consumer Tracker data is based upon 4,053 online interviews with weekly podcast consumers, ages 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Sampling was conducted continuously over the last two quarters of 2019, with Quarter Three interviews conducted July 7 through September 30, 2019 and Quarter Four interviews conducted October 1 through December 21, 2019. All respondents were instructed to enter the names of all podcasts they listened to the week before the interview into an online diary and were provided instructions to obtain that information from their podcast client/player of choice. All responses were unaided and hand-coded by Edison to determine actual show name, producer, genre, and other information. Data is weighted to nationally representative numbers for weekly podcast consumers from The Infinite Dial 2019, from Edison Research and Triton Digital.

The Podcast Consumer Tracker is Edison’s flagship podcast research study and is subscribed to by a host of producers and agencies including NPR, Wondery, WarnerMedia, ESPN, and many other leading players in the space. In addition to network reach statistics, the study also provides the only nationally representative look at the purchasing and consumption patterns of podcast listeners, content preferences, and advertising targeting information across a broad array of consumer goods and services.

Fielding is continuous and currently underway for the next quarterly report in the series, to be delivered in April 2020. More information is available at https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-podcast-consumer-quarterly-tracking-report/.