Media Monitors releases Q3 report

From Sept. 14–30, 2020, the Media Monitors surveyed participants in the United States 18 and older on whether they had listened to a podcast in the last seven days.

It additionally asked partakers to list the podcast titles and encouraged them consult their podcast app of choice during the survey. Media Monitors explains that these “unassisted responses were individually matched back to unique RSS feeds which were polled to collect information about genre and publisher.”

The survey results show that iHeartRadio leads all publishers on the Top 200 chart with 13 podcasts, narrowly beating out NPR with 12. Wondery, Earwolf and Westwood One tied with six shows each in the Top 200.

Podcasts “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “The Daily and “Crime Junkie” retain their top three positioning, while maintaining and slightly increasing the number of responses from last quarter.

The report finds the number of “comedy” podcasts in the Top 200 increasing from 45 in Q2 to 58 in Q3. “News” also saw an increase, going from 31 to 34. The “society and culture” category stayed third place overall while shedding eight podcasts. It also underscored that podcast listeners still like “true crime” topics and that “sports” podcasts rose by three.