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Podtrac releases first U.S. podcast audience rankings

With its new monthly ranking report, podcast vendor Podtrac has stepped up to address a critical need in the podcast industry.

The report, which uses Podtrac’s proprietary data, ranks podcast publishers based on monthly “unique U.S. audience.” That metric is defined as

the count of individual audience members who listen to shows published by a given publisher. Individuals may listen to multiple shows or multiple episodes of shows from a publisher in a month, but they are only counted once in the monthly Unique Audience metric.

Not surprisingly, NPR tops the April 2016 ranking with nearly 62 million downloads for 32 active shows, and a unique U.S. audience of 7.2 million. Two shows made the top 10 without the help of other network siblings — The Moth and Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible.

See the top 10 ranking by network here.

After ‘Serial,’ will podcasts thrive?

serial_logoThe breakout success of “Serial,” the podcast spun off from “This American Life” with host Sarah Koenig, has dramatically raised the profile of podcasting as a media format. Mashable’s Jason Abbruzzese reviews the phenomenon, calling the podcast an “artisanal” spoken word format. (See graphic below.) “Serial,” which in its first season revisited the murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee, will return with a new case for a second season. Will its success help other podcasts?

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