Podtrac’s Inaugural Podcast Industry Audience Ranking: April 2016
Unlike other forms of digital media, podcasting has never had a third-party measure of audience size. Podtrac’s newly released ranking of top podcast publishers fills that gap.
The Podcast Audience Ranking of Top Publishers is based on a new metric from Podtrac: “U.S. Unique Monthly Audience,” which is the count of individual audience members who listen to podcasts from a given publisher. While individuals may listen to multiple shows or multiple episodes of shows from a publisher in a month, they are only counted once in the monthly Unique Audience metric.
Podtrac’s inaugural Podcast Audience Ranking of Top Publishers is based on data from April 2016 and is topped by NPR, This American Life, WNYC Studios and HowStuffWorks. While the names on the list may not be a surprise to those in the industry, the ranking provides for the first time not only the relative size of the top shows but the measure of each publisher's U.S. Unique Monthly Audience. In April 2016 NPR had 7.2 million unique listeners across its 32 key shows, while This American Life and Serial had 5.6 million in the number two spot.
A downloadable version of Podtrac's April Podcast Audience Ranking of Top Publishers, which contains additional information, is available at Podtrac.com. You can also subscribe to the Podtrac blog to receive future updates to the Ranking.