Comedy, News, and Society and Culture Podcasts Most Listened-to Genres in Podcasting
By edisonresearch
Client response to the first delivery of our new Podcast Consumer Tracker has been tremendous, and we’ve gotten lots of great suggestions for future enhancements as we continue to evolve this study into the industry standard for measuring the podcast universe from the listener’s perspective. One suggestion, however, was so good, that we didn’t want to wait to incorporate it—and it’s one that we wanted to share publicly. The Podcast Consumer Tracker is the only comprehensive measure of what podcast consumers are listening to (not downloading) and we are continuously collecting data on thousands of podcasts. Since we are getting specific podcasts listened to by our sample of weekly consumers, it was a simple task to match our list with the podcast genre data that podcasters provide in their RSS feed (we chose Apple’s genre categories for consistency.)
And so, for the first time ever, here are the podcast genres with the greatest reach amongst U.S. weekly podcast consumers. A couple of notes. First of all, the Podcast Consumer Tracker measures humans—not downloads. The 36% listed for Comedy, for instance, is NOT the percentage of podcasts downloaded. Rather, this data shows the percentage of weekly podcast consumers who listened to at least one comedy podcast in the last week. Also, these figures do not represent any kind of compositional or share data–people can and do listen to podcasts from multiple genres. For more on the differences between reach (what we measure) and downloads, here’s a deeper dive on the topic.
The Edison Research Podcast Consumer Tracker is the only source for this data. Thanks to Wondery’s Hernan Lopez for the suggestion!
For more information on a quarterly subscription to the Podcast Consumer Tracker, contact Tom Webster at twebster@edisonresearch.com
