Edison Research has released its measurement of the top 100 podcasts in the U.S. for combined Q3 and Q4. As the company emphasizes, this is the only podcast ranker which doesn’t count downloads, and isn’t restricted to clients. Edison builds this ranking through a survey of 10,597 podcast consumers ages 13 and older in the U.S.
Edison explains: “Participants indicate which podcasts they listened to in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic, and purchase behavior information. The results are then coded and analyzed to ascertain the genre and network for each podcast. The relative audience size of each podcast is then calculated and expressed as the percentage of weekly podcast listeners reached by that show.”
The Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 show in this reckoning, unsurprisingly. Freakonomics Radio is #50, likewise honorable. Here is the entire list:
Any time I see an iHeartPodcasts show make these rankers, it makes me wonder if the show’s stats are skewed by the company buying millions of “listeners” through mobile-game ads, which trigger downloads of shows that no one may be hearing for more than seconds.
Bloomberg Article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/inside-podcasters-explosive-audience-growth