Podtrac has released an extension of its monthly podcast rankers which are promoted in RAIN and elsewhere. The new product is Podcast Category Rankings, and breaks out metrics by topical categories such as News (see the excerpt below) Comedy, True Crime, and all the 19 Apple Podcasts show categories. As such, the Category Rankings aspire to detail the podcast topography more exactly than the uncategorized Podtrac monthly rankers which list audience and downloads across all categories.
Because the category-specific information is presumably more important to publishers and advertisers, the Podtrac Category Rankings are a private subscription product. Subscribers must agree to a set of public-sharing rules designed to protect the private information of participants. (The metrics in the category reports are all IAB Certified.)
Note that in addition to absolute numbers for audience and downloads, the Category Rankings include month-oever-month and year-over-year riske and fall.
While the rankings beyond the above sample are proprietary and cannot be published, we can share a few nuggests provided by Podtrac:
- iHeartRadio had more shows on the rankings than any other publisher (76), followed by Wondery with 45 and NPR with 31.
- iHeartRadio had shows in more categories (16) than any other publisher, followed by Wondery and NPR (both at 14).
- NPR had the most #1 shows across all the categories at 8, followed by iHeart and Barstool (both at 2).