For most people, once they start listening to podcasts, they can’t stop. A new listener starts with that first show, which leads to another show, and down the podcasting rabbit hole they go. For others, it is a single show that captures their attention and all of their podcasting time gets devoted to it.
In Edison Research’s recently released Infinite Dial 2024 report, we determined that more than one-third (34%) of all Americans age 13 and older now listen to podcasts each week. Among this group, there is a portion that listens to only one podcast title in that week. Using Edison Podcast Metrics, the only service that measures the entire podcasting space, we can look at shows that perform best for garnering these kinds of listeners.
Looking at the 500 biggest active shows in America, below are the shows with the highest portion of their audience that listens exclusively to that show.
Each of these shows features a unique voice. But at the top of the list, and the leader by a large margin, is one of the many great stories that podcasting has spawned, a show hosted by Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from Minnesota. The Bible in a Year publishes every single day, starting on New Year’s Day and winding through the entire bible text and finishing by December 31. Edison Podcast Metrics estimates that an average of 30% of listeners to this show will not listen to any other show each week.
Podcasting allows so many unique voices to find their audience, often in a manner that no one else might have considered. That a priest in Duluth Minnesota could build a very large and clearly very devoted audience is just one of so many examples of how podcasting fills in spaces in the content universe and sometimes finds large spaces that no one else could see.
