January 2020- Top Podcast Publishers

The Top Podcast Publishers ranking for January 2020 is now available at Podtrac.com.

Highlights of the ranking include:

  • Three publishers moved up in the rankings in January while 4 moved down and all others held their positions from December.

  • Cumulus Media/Westwood One joined the ranking this month at #11.

  • The average Unique Monthly Audience for the top 10 publishers decreased by 5% from December 2019 while it increased by 37% from January of 2019.

  • Global Unique Streams & Downloads increased for the top 10 publishers by 20% over December.

  • In January 2020, Podtrac measured 1.3 billion IAB certified downloads across all measured publishers, up 21% from December 2019.

  • Note: In January, most publishers experienced a drop in UMA with a simultaneous increase in downloads. This divergence was precipitated by a popular podcast app providing less-specific User Agent data on which the IAB UMA algorithm relies. Podtrac is currently working on a refinement to the UMA algorithm to address this issue.

Note: As of April 2019, Global Downloads and Streams reflect updates to Podtrac’s measurement algorithm and are not directly comparable to months prior to April 2019. Unique Monthly Audience numbers were not impacted by this update.

Top 20 Podcasts: December 2019

Podtrac's ranking of the Top 20 Podcasts based on U.S. Unique Monthly Audience for December 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.

*With the increasing popularity of shows which publish multiple times a day, such as NPR News Now, beginning in December, we now include theses shows in the Podtrac Top Podcast ranking. Previously these shows were excluded. While the counts for these shows are IAB V2 compliant, it should be noted that a segment of their audience members may listen to these shows from multiple locations throughout the day and present themselves technically as multiple unique users.


December 2019- Top Podcast Publishers

The Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking for December 2019 is now available at Podtrac.com.

Highlights of the ranking include:

  • The Top 10 Podcast Publisher ranking has expanded to the Top 15. Look for further expansion in the coming months.

  • We’ve also added a Sales Contact column to facilitate potential advertisers in connecting with top shows. Visit the ranking at Podtrac.com to click-through to full contact information on participating publishers.

  • For December 2019, the Top 10 publishers average Unique Monthly Audience is up 5% over November 2019 and up 44% over December 2018.

Note: As of April 2019, Global Downloads and Streams reflect updates to Podtrac’s measurement algorithm and are not directly comparable to months prior to April 2019. Unique Monthly Audience numbers were not impacted by this update.




















Top 20 Podcasts: November 2019 - REVISED

We’ve updated the Podtrac November 2019 Top 20 Podcasts ranking, removing two shows from American Media LLC.  We learned today, from some heroic testing from James Cridland of Podnews, that an older version of a website player used by American Media downloads their podcasts without the user pressing play in the specific case of Android mobile users.  Preloading content is not consistent with IAB V2 standards. We have removed these downloads from our data.     

We looked at the incidence of this player version across all Podtrac measured podcasts, and other than this publisher, 0.1% of podcast downloads came from this same version of the player, and none of these came from the top 2,000 podcasts measured by Podtrac.  Podtrac has added this version of the player to our blacklist and has notified the IAB Podcast Technical Working Group to do the same. Going forward downloads from this player will not be included in Podtrac counts.    

Below is the revised Ranking.



November 2019- Top Podcast Publishers

The Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking for November 2019 is now available at Podtrac.com.

Highlights of the ranking include:

  • All Top 10 Publishers saw decreases in US Unique Monthly Audience in November compared to October, consistent with a seasonal dip we saw last November.

  • Average US Unique Monthly Audience across the Top 10 publishers is up 12% in November over October and up 29% from November of 2018.

Note: As of April 2019, Global Downloads and Streams reflect updates to Podtrac’s measurement algorithm and are not directly comparable to months prior to April 2019. Unique Monthly Audience numbers were not impacted by this update.



















October 2019- Top Podcast Publishers

The Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking for October 2019 is now available at Podtrac.com.

Highlights of the ranking include:

  • NBC News joins the ranking this month at #9.

  • All Top 10 Publishers saw increases in US Unique Monthly Audience in October compared to September, led by New York Times (18%) for the second month in a row.

  • Average US Unique Monthly Audience across the Top 10 publishers is up 10% in October over September and up 41% from October of 2018.

Note: As of April 2019, Global Downloads and Streams reflect updates to Podtrac’s measurement algorithm and are not directly comparable to months prior to April 2019. Unique Monthly Audience numbers were not impacted by this update.