A Profile of the Top-Ranked Podcasts in the U.S.
By Galen Stocking, Katerina Eva Matsa, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin, Elisa Shearer, Mark Jurkowitz and Shreenita Ghosh for Pew Research Center
Although it’s much newer than other media like television or books, the podcast ecosystem has created a rich library of content covering a wide range of topics both popular and niche.
A new Pew Research Center study of 451 of the top-ranked podcasts in the United States shows this diversity of subjects: No single topic is the main focus of more than a quarter of these podcasts.
True crime is the most common topic, making up 24% of these top-ranked podcasts – perhaps reflecting the early popularity of Serial. The next most common topics are politics and government (10%); entertainment, pop culture and the arts (9%); and self-help and relationships (8%).
There are also a number of podcasts that don’t fit into any of these topics (12%), such as fictional radio stories and teams of people playing the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
One-fifth of these top podcasts – which are those with the highest average daily rankings on Apple’s and Spotify’s lists of top podcasts in a six-month period in 2022 – discuss multiple topics. Many of these podcasts are like talk shows, with the discussion flowing across topics.
The list of top podcasts generally reflects the interests of U.S. listeners. Among the 49% of U.S. adults who said in a 2022 Center survey that they listened to a podcast in the last year, entertainment, politics, history and true crime were all among the most common topics these podcast listeners turned to.
To assess the presence of news in the podcast universe, researchers also looked at how many of the top-ranked podcasts are focused primarily on news and current events, finding that 15% of the podcasts studied fit this description.
News-focused podcasts can be about any topic, though most are about politics and government (49%) or sports (29%). Many have their roots in talk radio, and some, like The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, are directly connected to radio shows.
Across topics, the most common format among news-focused podcasts is commentary (49%), while smaller shares – 22% each – are centered around deep reporting (podcasts that do in-depth examinations or analyses of a topic or story) or interviews. Just 6% are news summaries. Commentary is especially dominant among sports podcasts (82%).
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