Westwood One/Cumulus Media debut on the January 2020 Podtrac ranker

Podtrac released its list of the top 15 podcast publishers from January 2020. The month included a mixed set of results in terms of performance. Overall, Podtrac tracked 1.3 billion IAB-certified downloads across all its measured publishers, a spike of 21% from December 2019. Global unique streams and downloads for the publishers on the chart grew 20% from December. The average unique monthly audience dipped 5% from the prior month.

Podtrac noted that divide between monthly uniques and downloads in its post. “This divergence was precipitated by a popular podcast app providing less-specific User Agent data on which the IAB UMA algorithm relies,” the company said. “Podtrac is currently working on a refinement to the UMA algorithm to address this issue.”

Westwood One/Cumulus Media made their debut on the publisher chart, with 98 shows helping the networks land at No. 11. Most of the other publishers are familiar names from this ranker, including NPR still at the top of the heap.

Anna Washenko