Edison Research Announces Top 50 U.S. Podcasts for 2020

RADIO ONLINE | Tuesday, February 9, 2021 | 2:04pm CT

Edison Research

Edison Research has announced its first comprehensive U.S. Top 50 podcast chart. This list ranks the 50 biggest podcasts of 2020 by audience size, based on the Podcast Consumer Tracker, which measures the relative audience size and demographics of all podcast networks.

"We have sampled over 10,000 podcast listeners to determine who they are, what shows they listen to, what they buy, and the demographic profiles for every leading network and top podcast," said Edison Research SVP Tom Webster. "There is no other service available for producers or agencies that provides this information for the entire industry."

Among the top shows of 2020 are as follows:

The Edison Research Top 50 Podcasts of 2020 list is derived from data collected continuously throughout 2020 from surveying weekly podcast consumers ages 18 and older. Participants indicate which podcasts they listened to in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic and purchase behavior information. The results are then coded and analyzed to ascertain the genre, network, and sales representation for each podcast. The relative audience size of each podcast network is then calculated and expressed as the percentage of weekly podcast listeners reached by that network.

"Existing measures of downloads are important," noted Webster. "We aren't replacing that -- but currently we have demographic data on all major networks, how they rank against each other, and credible estimates of network size calibrated by our ongoing work on The Infinite Dial research series, which remains the most widely-used audience data in the industry. It is the only service based on actual listens, not downloads."

Current subscribers to the Podcast Consumer Tracker include half of the top 20 networks in podcasting as well as leading technology platforms, and is growing quarterly. Subscribers include Stitcher/Midroll, NPR, Wondery, ESPN/ABC/Disney, WarnerMedia and more.

"From day one of a subscription we are able to provide leading podcast networks with the size and demographic makeup of their audience. Our dataset gets more and more robust every day, and we are immensely proud of this service we can provide to the industry," added Webster.