Podtrac has released its ranking of the top podcast publishers for February 2020. All fifteen publishers saw growth in their U.S. unique monthly audience from the previous month, with an average increase of 9%. The on-year average growth in monthly audience was 41%.
The names on the chart are all the same from January. While there were some slight shifts in order, NPR continued to hold the #1 spot, followed by iHeartRadio. The New York Times took third. Here is the Podtrac chart (and continue scrolling to see RAIN’s remix):
We like to remix the Podtrac publisher list to gain insight about how the audience, and streams/downloads, are distributed. Broadly speaking, two strategies are in play: 1. High concentration in a small number of shows, and 2. broad distribution of audience and plays over a big podcast portfolio. Those two phenomena are clearly demonstrated in the #1 (NPR, few shows) and #2 (iHeartRadio, many shows) top publishers.
The following RAIN chart re-ranks the Podtrac ranking by audience (top) and downloads/streams (bottom).
