The latest Edison Research Podcast Metrics for the UK has just been published with a top 25 based on reach during Q2 2024
This follows previous releases for Q1 2024, Q4 2024, Q3 2024 and Q2 2024.
The top four podcast remain the same and in the same order this quarter. Then we get a certain amount of re-shuffling of the decks and finally some new entries.
Here’s a view of the data tracked over time.
Two things happened during this quarter that almost certainly had an impact on this ranking. There was a General Election called on 22 May 2024, roughly half-way through the period; and the European Championships took place with England progressing to the final. Both the election and the final happened in the early weeks of Q3, but the build-up is all important.
So in the news and politics world we see The Rest is Politics continue to ride high, while Newscast shot up the rankings, just pipping The News Agents.
Meanwhile The Rest Is Football jumped up a massive 11 places, and there was a new entry in The Overlap with Gary Neville coming in at number 24. Essentially the BBC and ITV TV pundits reflected in their “side-hustle” podcasts. (Football Daily seems to be missing from this list and I’m somewhat surprised given its high showing in the BBC’s own published figures.)
The Rest Is Entertainment makes its first appearance on the list, presented by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman. It comes in at number 17, and means that production company Goalhanger Podcasts has four titles in the top 25, more than anyone aside from the BBC’s 5 entries.
The BBC titles include Just One Thing – with Michael Mosley which is also a new entry. He tragically died whilst on holiday on a Greek island, and there was an enormous amount of news coverage and an outpouring of sympathy for him during this period. But as previous BBC numbers have shown, this had become an increasingly popular podcast regardless.
The other new entry is Call Her Daddy which is massive in the US where it is currently the number 4 podcast. Presenter Alex Cooper has just signed a deal for $125m with SiriusXM such is the popularity of her title.
But that makes her a rare exception of being a US podcast in the UK top 25 list. With The Daily from the New York Times being one of those to fall out of the chart this month, only Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience are to be found in both Edison’s UK and US top podcast lists.
We don’t see estimates of the actual number of listeners of these titles, so it’s hard to discern where 10,000 or 1,000,000 people are listening to Joe Rogan. But I think that the top 3/4 are basically unchanged means that they’ve moved a way a little from the pack. Then there’s another group in the 5-15 that can move around relatively easily within the bounds of that part of the table. Then beyond that, it gets quite messy and titles can fall out and re-enter the chart.
The methodology leans towards (but isn’t solely) recall, so strong branding is important to aid positioning. And of course not all titles on this chart are “always on.” Series like Uncanny and You’re Dead to Me publish in seasons and therefore there aren’t always new episodes in a given quarter. That said, nearly all the rest of the titles here are effectively “always on.”
More specifically on the methodology, Edison Research says:
Edison Podcast Metrics is unique in that it is not dependent on podcast download data and does not require podcast networks to opt into its service. At least 2,000 weekly podcast listeners in the UK are surveyed each quarter for the service, and listening behavior is collected regardless of listening platform. The same methodology is being employed in the UK as is used in the U.S.