The New York Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, is America’s third most popular podcast, new research suggests.
The Daily, launched in February 2017, trails only The Joe Rogan Experience and Crime Junkie in an Edison Research ranking.
Edison’s top 50 US podcasts list includes nine titles that are classified as news, according to Press Gazette analysis of the ranking.
After The Daily, the ranking includes The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro Show in ninth. Serial, owned by The New York Times, was America’s 12th most popular podcast in the year to March 2022.
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The other news-focused titles to make the top 50 were Crooked Media’s Pod Save America (ranked 13th), NPR News Now (16th), NPR’s Up First (17th), Cumulus Podcast Network’s Dan Bongino Show (18th), NBC’s Rachel Maddow Show (32nd), and Cumulus’ Mark Levin Show (39th).
The top 50 contains nine news-orientated podcasts, making it the second most popular genre after comedy (15), ahead of true crime (eight), and society and culture (five).
Below, Press Gazette has published a ranking of the nine news-focused podcasts that feature in Edison’s top 50 list. We used Apple Podcasts information to define a title’s genre.
Edison Research regularly publishes US podcast rankings. In previous lists, The Daily has come in second place. The latest research suggests it lost its place to Audiochuck’s Crime Junkie in the latest period, between April 2021 and March 2022. In 2020, The New York Times revealed The Daily was attracting 4m listeners per day.
Accurate podcast listenership statistics are notoriously difficult to obtain and are often only released by networks themselves.
Edison forms its ranking by surveying weekly podcast consumers aged 18 and over in the US. Participants “indicate which podcasts they listened to in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic, and purchase behaviour information”. Edison then calculates relative audience size. Its latest ranking is based on surveys of 8,000 podcast listeners.
Edison Research also recently published a ranking of podcast networks by reach. SXM Media, Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR and The New York Times made up the top five.
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