Sharon Taylor — EVP, Triton Digital and ex-CEO of Omny Studio — has released the 2024 edition of Omny’s annual podcast benchmark report. In it we learn about download rates by content category and geographical region, and which of those rates can be considered “good.”
NOTE: All the info in this report comes from podcasts hosted by Omny Studio. According to a press release dated February 27, Omny hosts over 70,000 podcasts.
A “Good” Number
the most basic question first: How many downloads per episode is “good”? As we see in the chart below, six ranking categories are revealed, representing levels of elite download performance by top percentile levels:
In the graphic above, Omny observes that a podcast needs about 43,000 downloads to land in the top one percent. Optimistically, reaching the top 1-2 percent is more achievable today than in the past, as listeners are consuming more material from a greater range of shows.
The Benchmarked Categories
Omny has itemized the top ten downloaded podcast categories — a sort of topographical view of podcast types:
Following the introduction of the 10 topical categories above, Omny takes on the task of benchmarking each of them. There is interesting commentary for each one — it is a key reason why everyone reading this should look at the original deck. (It is HERE — a LinkedIn page posted by Omny Media; there is no downloadable file.)
Topical Category Benchmarks
to provide a sample which gives some comparative perspective on the topical categories, we have pulled out The number of downloads in each category which places a show in the top 10% of all shows in that category.
NEWS: 2.261 downloads for top 10
COMEDY: 11,869 downloads for top 10
SOCIETY and CULTURE: 21,173 downloads for top 10
SPORTS: 7,900 downloads for top 10
Regional Benchmarks
As with the topical divisions above, regions around the world have different benchmarks for landing podcasts in the top 10% of consumption.
UK: 1,436 downloads for top 10
North America: 2,659 downloads for top 10
LATAM: 2,086 downloads for top 10
…And When?
Finally, Omny has benchmarked the percentages of total downloads during four time periods after publishing. Those time periods range from one hour to 28 days. As seen below there are three total-download totals which are compared.
Sharon Taylor shares thoughts about that final chart:
No real surprises that most episodes get to around 50% of downloads, 24 hours after release. What’s most interesting to me is how much the most popular episodes differ from the rest – they’re slower to reach most of the markers, meaning they have a longer tail of downloads. Evergreen content? Or maybe the more popular genres simply are less time sensitive for people to consume?
For those of us who have been in the industry a long time, we’ve lost count of how many times an advertiser asks “But how do we know if the episode was listened to? Aren’t there a lot of auto downloads to people’s devices?”. Well, not in the first hour of publishing, according to this data (which you’d be forgiven for thinking is how auto downloads work).
I’ll leave you to interpret the data yourself, but to me, the data above points to very intentional listening (aka, what those of us in the industry have been saying for a long time) and shows why advertising campaigns targeting specific episodes should be run for at least a month.
See the original HERE.
