Podcast Research · April 14, 2020

Buying The Top Five Podcast Networks Reaches 50% of Weekly Podcast Consumers

By twebster

 

One of the reasons we started the Podcast Consumer Tracker here at Edison Research was to answer some of the most common questions media buyers and agencies have about buying podcast advertising. While in its early days podcasting was not considered a “reach” medium, today with the growing size of the leading podcast networks, efficient buys at scale are now increasingly possible.

We took a look at the cumulative data from Q4 of 2019 (we are just about to deliver Q1 2020 to clients) to get a sense of the unduplicated cumulative reach of the leading podcast networks. The top network in our tracking study currently reaches 22% of all weekly podcast consumers (which, according to the Infinite Dial 2020, is currently 24% of the population ages 12+.) When you add the second leading network into a hypothetical buy, and eliminate the duplicated listeners, leaving only the new, unique listeners of the second-leading network, a media buyer can then reach 31% of weekly podcast consumers.

Our research shows that 50% reach of weekly podcast consumers can be achieved through buying the top five podcast networks. Achieving that kind of reach 10 years ago would have meant buying thousands of individual podcasts, but as these reach numbers continue to change, buying podcasts at scale is more feasible than ever.

The Podcast Consumer Tracker is the only comprehensive measure of podcasting’s reach and audience. For more information on this study, please contact Tom Webster at twebster@edisonresearch.com.

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