This is a follow-up to a piece I just published which looked at the newly launched Podtrac ranker for the UK and compared it with Edison Research’s equivalent ranker. Even allowing for the variability of these kinds of things with different methodologies, there were some profoundly questionable results.

And to be clear, recall surveys like that from Edison Research are not perfect either. “Recall bias” is a real phenomenon in surveys and it takes some effort to avoid it.

But it was suggested that having looked at the UK, it might be worth looking at Australia. There, Triton Digital publishers a monthly Australian Podcast Ranker. This is compiled not with a recall survey, but using actual data from participants. The key thing to know is that much of the Australian podcasting ecosystem is signed up to it. That includes many of the major Australian commercial radio broadcasters (all of whom have significant podcast footprints), the ABC, News Corp Australia and many others. Some big US groups like SiriusXM and Wondery are also measured in the market. The full list is at the bottom of the ranker.

That all said, some major US podcast networks are missing – Joe Rogan for example. And big UK groups like Goalhanger and the BBC are not measured either.

But because Triton has access to full data, they can publish “listeners” as a separate metric from “download” (in reality Unique Devices is probably a fairer description), and usefully, the ranker includes the number of new episodes published in a given period.

As with the UK picture, I’ve looked at Podtrac’s data and compared it with Triton’s data – but this time both parties are measuring September 2024 so we have equivalent survey periods.

Again, I’ve looked in particular at the top ten measured by Triton see where they sit on Podtrac. Here’s an overview of that, again with apologies to those on mobile who may have trouble reading it:

I would first note that the Triton ranker is sorted by Monthly Listeners and not Downloads. That’s important because some podcasts publish much more frequently than others. But that should be in line with what Podtrac is measuring since the third-party data it’s collecting can’t really represent downloads.

Conversations from the ABC is number 1 on Podtrac, but at number 7 on Triton. And Triton knows that six other titles it measures are bigger than Conversations.

Conversations is a Monday-Friday podcast so it had more episodes published in September than Hamish & Andy who came out on top on the Triton ranker, but Triton is reporting that the comedy duo have twice the number of listeners as Conversations has.

The other big story here is that the number three Triton podcast, ABC News Top Stories, isn’t anywhere on the Podtrac list! The reason is likely to be a smart-speaker thing. With 398 episodes in September (an average of 13 episodes a day), this is a top-of-hour news bulletin formatted for podcast and smart-speaker. When you ask Alexa or Google for the news, this is likely to be the default for many Australian listeners. I don’t know that most of that listening is coming via smart speakers, but I strongly suspect it. And I do know that if I subscribed to a podcast RSS feed that published upwards of 13 episodes a day, I’d very quickly unsubscribe. (The BBC World Service used to publish something called BBC Minute for similar purposes. It published 48 episodes a day! Technically you could follow the RSS feed, but you probably didn’t want to…)

Sky News Australia Update only seemed to have two episodes in September, but Triton has them well-listened to. They don’t show up at all on Podtrac.

On the other hand, Podtrac has The Rest is History at number 2 and The Joe Rogan Experience at number 6. Neither of these are on the Triton list because they don’t provide Triton with their data in Australia. The Rest is History certainly is a big enough podcast to have sustained an Australia and New Zealand live tour last November, so I trust that it’s popular. But the second biggest title in the country?

Other quirks in the data. What’s that Rash? from the ABC is at number 5 on Podtrac, but way down at number 81 on Triton. How Other Dads Dad with Hamish Blake (aka one half of Hamish & Andy) is at number 7 on Podtrac, a few places above Hamish & Andy itself which is at number 11. But Triton has Hamish & Andy as Australia’s number 1 podcast as mentioned above, while How Other Dads Dad is right down at 69.

And based on Podtrac rankings, the biggest news podcast in Australia is, er, The Daily from The New York Times. In a US election year, I can certainly see a title like The Daily doing well globally. But surely an Australian produced news podcast would be bigger in Australia? There are plenty of candidates in the Triton list.

So while Podtrac certainly fills in the blanks for international broadcasters who don’t provide data to Triton in the Australian market, there are some curious anomalies between what they’re suggesting versus what Triton can more accurately discern from the data is does have access to.

Photo above AI generated with Adobe Photoshop using the prompt: “A photorealistic kangaroo counting with an abacus in a kitchen”