Triton Digital has released a 2023 full-year podcast study, the U.S. Podcast Report; A Year In Review — Podcast Listening Landscape & Trends.
The report’s mission is to “cover trends in podcast listening and the devices and platforms that listeners use.” The sources of its information include a 12,000-subject survey conducted with Signal Hill Insights.
The broadest finding in this 17-page study release is that podcast reach continues to grow, favoring younger listeners, males, college graduates, and affluent listeners. Those points and more are laid out in an opening graphic:
A few other key points:
- Older Americans and women are catching up and listening to podcasting at a faster rate over the past two years.
- No surprise that most listening happens through mobile devices, but here is Triton’s number for that: 94.1%.
- YouTube is adding podcast listeners faster than Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
- Apple Podcast listeners are a more affluent group (37% over $100k) than YouTube (17%).
What are people listening to? True Crime, of course … but not as much as News:
Triton links this report to its Podcast Ranker product, creating a full-year version of that monthly update. In it, we see Sirius XM Podcast Network as the #1 sales organization for podcasting, followed by NPR and Wondery as #2 and #3. Sirius serves 52-million weekly downloads across its sales network portfolio. Another interesting chart represents top sales networks by podcast genre. In that reckoning, we see Audacy breaking through the NPR/SiriusXM stranglehold to win the top download spot in the Sports genre. (It’s on page 11.)
Top podcast of the year (2023)? It is NPR News Now (by downloads), the familiar top podcast in Triton’s monthly rankers. Trigon goes much deeper. This report gives us the top podcast by genre, the top podcasts for an aggregate of the top three most popular genres (Comedy, News, True Crime), top debuts, and an extraordinary slide showing highest indexing shows by audience characteristic and by purchase intent.
This is the Bravo! slide in the deck, and special applause to the graphic designer who squeezed so much info into one screen. (It is page 15.)
This review is a bare sketch of this latest effort from Triton Digital. Get it HERE.