The 2024 elections are well past us now, but there are still lessons to learn about how and where people talked about races up and down the ballot. Edison Podcast Metrics™ illustrates where weekly podcast listeners in particular saw or heard conversations about recent elections, and the results might surprise you.
Beginning immediately after the U.S. general election in November, we began asking weekly podcast listeners where they had seen or heard discussions about the election. As the nearby graph shows, the leading source among weekly podcast listeners 18+ is YouTube (54%), clearly surpassing all other platforms. While some dispute Facebook’s enduring popularity, it’s still the second most popular platform for political discourse among weekly podcast listeners.
Local TV and podcasts are tied for third place on this list, each earning 44% respectively. Local TV remains an important destination for political conversations and advertising, but newer digital platforms seem to be growing in popularity and influence, especially among weekly podcast listeners.
Impressively, TikTok is tied with Cable TV for the sixth most popular platform. Over one-third of weekly podcast listeners 18+ saw or heard discussions about recent elections on TikTok.
Podcasters and other media observers have rightfully referred to the 2024 Presidential election as the “Podcast Election.” At the same time, more and more podcast consumption is happening on YouTube. So perhaps it is more fair to deem the 2024 election the “Podcasting and YouTube Election.”
