Edison Launches Podcast Tracking Report

Edison Research has delivered to clients the first and only comprehensive measure of the comparative reach of America’s top podcast networks, the Podcast Consumer Tracker.

Edison, the leading podcast research company in the world, has been studying this rapidly evolving medium since 2006, and the Podcast Consumer Tracker represents the first successful endeavor to present a unified look at audience information at the publisher/network level.

The Podcast Consumer Tracker also contains competitive intelligence, audience demographics, and sales targeting information for podcast publishers and networks. The Podcast Consumer Tracker from Edison currently has 10 charter subscribers, including NPR, PodcastOne, Wondery, ESPN, WarnerMedia, and other significant publishing and agency partners. The study is based on a continuous sampling of consumers who have listened to a podcast in the last week. Comparative rankings of publisher networks are available only to subscribers.

Among the findings of the first report:

• The Joe Rogan Experience is the leading podcast in terms of reach amongst weekly podcast consumers.
• There are significant content consumption differences between iPhone and Android users, rendering “Top Podcast” charts derived exclusively from users of either to be unrepresentative of total listening behavior.
• While the study tracks the relative reach of the top podcast networks, 54% of weekly podcast consumers have listened to an unaffiliated, independent podcast in the last week.

“This is the first study in the podcast space to tackle a universal measure of reach,” notes Edison SVP Tom Webster. “There are, of  course, various charts of downloads that cover parts of the overall universe, but those either reflect only a portion of the podcast audience, or they only measure publishers that opt-in. The Podcast Consumer Tracker’s goal is a truly inclusive measure of the comparative penetration of the leading publishers and networks. In that, we have been highly successful.”