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The Top 50 podcasts with the largest U.S. 13+ weekly audience size is available on our website from Edison Podcast Metrics Q4 2025. Edison Podcast Metrics captures weekly podcast audience size among U.S. podcast consumers 13+. Data on the entire podcast universe, with specific information about thousands of podcasts, is released to full subscribers every quarter. The list below shows the top ten shows, with rank changes in parentheses.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Crime Junkie
The Daily
Call Her Daddy
SmartLess
Stuff You Should Know (+4)
This American Life (+5)
This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von (-2)
Dateline NBC (-1)
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce (-3)

Golden Globes best podcast winner, Good Hang with Amy Poehler, reaches #38 and Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO breaks into the Top 50 for the first time. Visit our website to see the full Top 50 list and learn about other notable changes to the ranker. More information on Edison Podcast Metrics can be found here.

When Do the Top 50 Podcasts Release Their Episodes?

Creating a dedicated and engaged podcast audience is dependent on a variety of different factors, one being when episodes are released. While crafting an effective release schedule requires careful consideration, insights from Edison Podcast Metrics and Ausha can help you make informed and strategic decisions.  

This week, we use the newly released Top 50 podcasts from Edison Podcast Metrics Q4 2025 and Ausha’s PSO Benchmark tool to understand when most episodes are released. Among the Top 50, the most frequent publication day is Monday, with 268 episodes posted on Apple Podcasts. The second most popular release day is Thursday, with 173 episodes published.  As the graphic below shows, episode drops diminish over the weekend.  Episode release tallies by day are calculated using the last 20 episode drops for each of the Top 50 podcasts.

Releasing episodes on weekdays also aligns with when many Americans are more likely to have set routines and structure to their days. Weekday episode drops might also increase your chances of finding new listeners, since many are already on podcast listening platforms and apps on those days.  

Again, episode release strategy is nuanced. Finding the right approach depends on your podcast’s format, audience, and other factors. These insights are valuable for guiding your experimentation, but there’s no replacement for understanding your own show. The analysis shown above is just a small sample of the insights offered by Edison Research and Ausha. Explore our full collaboration with Ausha, The Anatomy of a Top 50 Podcast.