Edison Research Released Podcast Industry’s Top 10 Podcast Ranker

Edison Research is pleased to announce its first Top Ten Podcast ranker, new from the company’s subscription product, The Podcast Consumer Tracker (PCT). The ranker depicts the top ten podcasts in America by reach among weekly podcast consumers. The PCT is the only comprehensive and all-inclusive study of the reach of podcast networks and shows in America.

The top ten podcasts in America for the third and fourth quarters of 2019, as ranked by the percentage of weekly podcast consumers 18+ who have listened to them, is as follows:

(1) The Joe Rogan Experience
(2) This American Life
(3) The Daily
(4) My Favorite Murder
(5) Crime Junkie
(6) Stuff You Should Know
(7) Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
(8) Serial
(9) Pod Save America
(10) Radiolab

Begun in Summer 2019, the PCT is now in its third quarter of fielding and is the only study that measures the entire podcast space continuously, compared to other download rankers which only measure participants/customers of those rankers, or users of a specific platform. As such, the PCT offers a holistic view of the reach and impact of all leading podcasts and podcast networks.

“This ranker looks deceptively simple,” notes Edison Senior Vice President Tom Webster, “but it’s the product of hand-coding tens of thousands of podcasts from a sample of over 4,000 podcast listeners. Podcast listening is still fairly fragmented, and it wasn’t until we had this large sample that we felt it would be responsible to even put out a top ten, let along a longer list.”

The PTC is sampled continuously throughout each quarter to negate the effects of limited releases and new shows and is weighted to the industry standard measure of podcast listening, the Infinite Dial research series from Edison Research and Triton Digital.