NPR Slips as iHeartPodcast Tops Media Monitors Ranker

RADIO ONLINE | Friday, May 13, 2022 | 11:34am CT

Media Monitors

The Media Monitors Podcast Listener survey, fielded between March 14-31, found the iHeartPodcast Network retained the top slot on its top ten ranker to start 2022. NPR was conspicuously absent from the top publisher list this quarter, replaced by a number of larger commercial podcast publishers such as SiriusXM, Amazon Music/Wondery and Audacy, while Spotify's overall total was boosted by several True Crime podcasts.

The Joe Rogan Experience (#1) was still the #1 podcast in the Media Monitors survey. This is unlikely to change in the near future, as the nearest quarterly competitor The Daily from The New York Times, fell from #2 to #6 overall.

Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain made its Top 25 debut this quarter, and The Joe Budden Podcast (#21) has regained its popularity after drama surrounding its participants caused a shakeup in hosting.

Both of Bailey Sarian's podcasts Dark History (#8) and Murder Mystery & Makeup (#14) produced by Audioboom Studios made the Top 25 this quarter. Bailey is a YouTube personality with over 6.27 million subscribers, so it seems she has been able to convert those viewers to avid listeners.

Top 10 Categories from Top 200 Podcasts

Comedy retains its spot as the most popular genre of podcast, True Crime has held strong after significant gains last quarter (36 Podcasts in Q4 2021, 35 in Q1 2022).

Notable True Crime podcasts from Q1 in our Top 200: Rotten Mango (#35) from Audacy, Lights Out Podcast (#39) from Mile Higher Media, Murder With My Husband (#49) from The iHeartPodcast Network, MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories (#70), Cold (#117) from Amazon Music/Wondery.

Participants aged 18+ were screened on whether they had listened to a podcast in the last 7 days, then asked to list the podcast titles. Each was encouraged to consult their podcast app of choice during the survey. These unassisted responses were then individually matched back to unique RSS feeds which were polled to collect information about genre and publisher.