U.S. podcast listening is on the up

U.S. podcast listening is on the up according to the May results of Triton Digital’s Podcast Metrics measurement service. 

Average weekly downloads for the top 20 publishers in the U.S. is at 228 million downloads, up by an impressive 10m downloads on April’s numbers.  At the top, there are few changes, with NPR’s popular NPR News Now keeping its number one spot in the U.S. Podcast Charts for the fifth month in a row, and Stitcher Media staying at the top of the Networks Report. Stitcher has 59.6 million average weekly downloads and an average 14.8 million weekly users

This month Triton Digital has also introduced additional insights by leveraging podcast metrics inclusive of Demos+.

According to Triton, Demos+ utilizes census-level data to identify listener overlap to scale the podcast survey-based insights. The company says it enables them to project the audience composition for all sizes of podcast, a capability previously hindered by podcast survey sample-size limitations. This gives a clearer view of podcast audiences and means marketers can more easily identify the podcasts which best reach their target audience.

Some of the additional insights featured in the May report include:

• Top five podcast genres (most downloaded): News was the most downloaded category (27.1%), followed by True Crime (20.3%), Comedy (17.6%), Society & Culture (7.1%), and Sports (6.3%).
• Downloads by device type: The majority of downloads occurred on mobile devices (93.1%), whereas only 1.8% occurred on a desktop or laptop.
• Top three highest indexing shows for women 18+: Watch What Crappens (Stitcher Media), Something Was Wrong (Wondery), and The Viall Files (Kast Media) were the top 3.
• Top three highest indexing shows for men 18+: The Pat McAfee Show 2.0 (Stitcher Media), The Fighter & The Kid (Kast Media) and 2 Bears 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer (Stitcher Media) ranked highest.

For more of these insights, view the U.S. Podcast Audience Insights infographic.

You can get free access to Triton’s range of podcast reports here, or you can opt-in to receive its podcast reports via email here.