Megaphone finds contemporary podcasts are getting shorter

The latest blog post from Megaphone is a series of visualizations about how average podcast length has changed over time. The company reviewed data from the 549 podcasts on the Apple Podcasts Top 200 list between March 6th-May 11th. The results showed a large number of podcast episodes running just shy of an hour, which Megaphone deemed a nod to classic radio formatting. Continue Reading

Voxnest explores most popular listening times by podcast category

Voxnest has been publishing several analyses about different corners of podcast listening, and the latest one is about show categories. The company’s new report finds that listening habits vary across different show subjects, which could mean different best practices for podcasters in terms of publishing times and time-specific advertisements. Continue Reading

PODTRAC: NPR top publisher in June (plus RAIN data remix for audience-per-show)

Podtrac released the Top 10 Podcast Publishers ranking for June. In it, the tightly competitive reign of NPR (#1) and iHeartRadio (#2) continued as in previous months. RAIN has remixed the ranker to list publishers according to the size of audience, and number of plays, per show produced by each publisher. The result shines light on the power of hit shows vs. the power of a network ecosystem.  Continue Reading

53M+ smart speaker owners in U.S.: NPR/Edison Research Smart Speaker Report

Fifty-three million American adults own smart speakers. Because some people and households own multiple speakers, that adds up to 118.5-million devices — a 78% increase in overall device ownership year-over-year. This, and much other data, come from the NPR/Edison Research Smart Audio Report, released in a webinar today. Continue Reading