Last week Podtrac announced the availability of its podcast tracker in 30 countries including the UK.

Podtrac has for a while been publishing US figures including a list of Top Podcast and Top Publishers, but this is an opt-in methodology. In other words, the publishers that appear on those lists have chosen to let Podtrac count their downloads/streams. That means, for example, that you won’t find The Joe Rogan Experience in Podtrac’s list despite being ranked #1 by Edison Research in the US, because he has not chosen to participate.

This does make their lists quite selective, and there are other major US podcasts (at least according to Edison Research’s rankings which do not require opt-in) that are missing from their charts.

For Podtrac’s new country-specific charts, they have chosen to use a different methodology, and they outline it on a useful page that compares the strengths and weaknesses of all podcast counting methodologies. For these charts, including the UK, they are using a combination of downloads and estimated downloads.

In other words, some publishers are choosing to work with them, as they do in the US. And for those publishers, the numbers should be accurate. But for those who have not chosen to work with them – and across 30 countries with possibly thousands of publishers, that’s probably the vast majority – they are using estimates. Podtrac acknowledges that those estimates will differ from actual measured data.

How are they deriving those estimates?

“Podtrac uses multiple sources to identify podcasts to maximize the comprehensiveness of its Country Rankings, and continues to identify additional sources of podcasts. It’s possible there are top podcasts outside of Podtrac’s current sources. Includes RSS podcasts only.”

This probably means using public chart data from the likes of Apple Podcasts and Spotify, potentially alongside other data from podcast clients. Allied with the numbers they do have from participating producers, they can adjust the relative weighting of different sources – e.g. how much should they favour Apple vs Spotify for a title – and end up with a chart that includes every title.

Although they mention surveys as a methodology it doesn’t seem that there is any surveying going on in these new additional countries.

Podtrac says that it will be updating its charts monthly, and the first release is for September 2024.

However, since Edison Research has been releasing UK-specific top podcast lists for more than a year, it’s interesting to compare the most recent Edison data with the top 100 from Podtrac.

Obviously these are very different methodologies. Edison Research uses a sample of respondents to determine their ranking, while Podtrac, as outlined, uses a combination of actual data from producers who partner with it and third-party data. Also, the survey dates are different for these two. Edison Research’s most recent data was for Q2 2024 (Apr-Jun 2024), whilst Podtrac’s first release is for September 2024.

Nevertheless, here is a comparison of the two. It’s best viewed on a laptop/desktop as you will need to scroll:

To make things a little easier, I’ve highlighted the top ten podcasts as measured by Edison Research and have colour-coded them so you can see where Podtrac ranks them.

The first thing to note is that The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, consistently the number 2 podcast as measured by Edison Research, is down at number 80 with Podtrac. This is wildly out of line with where most people would expect that podcast to lie.

The Joe Rogan Experience, which is consistently number 1 on Edison Research’s list is down at number 10 on Podtrac. Meanwhile The Rest is Politics gets the number one slot compared with number 4 on Edison.

That Peter Crouch Podcast, number 5 on Edison, is down at 35 on Podtrac, while Help I Sexted My Boss is at number 7 on Edison, but at number 24 on Podtrac.

I’d also note that ShxtsNGigs, just outside the top 10 on Edison at number 11, only gets to number 65 on Podtrac. And Crime Junkie at number 14 on Edison is far down the list at number 93 on Podtrac.

And no, I don’t know why The Intelligence from The Economist is at both number 30 and 38 on Podtrac. That feels like a typo to me.

BBC shows don’t seem to do very well on Podtrac. You’re Dead to Me and Uncanny both make the Edison top 25, whereas neither make it into the top 100 on Podtrac. And is Rugby Union Weekly really the BBC’s biggest sports podcast? Bigger than Five Live’s Football Daily which doesn’t make the Podtrac list at all?

Other titles are more within the places you’d expect them. As I’ve written before, there are a number of top 10-15 titles who bounce around, and so two different surveys will show them rising and falling a fair amount. And then there’s the long tail which is very long.

And of course, these surveys are a few months apart, so there will be differences – some shows might have been off for periods of the year. But that doesn’t explain some wildly “off” rankings for titles like The Diary of a CEO and Crime Junkie.

I think Podtrac’s methodology is going to take a while to bed down, and there might not be enough third-party data to do this work properly. For example, Apple Podcasts ranks have a recency bias – a great article on Podnews goes into detail about what is known. But in essence, it’s not very exciting to have a chart where the top 10 is unchanged week in/week out if you are trying to get people to listen to more podcasts, which Apple and Spotify are. Podtrac’s ranking methods page does acknowledge that chart data often incorporates “trending” data within it.

On the one hand, this is more publicly accessible data. On the other hand, it’s not everything you might think it is.

I’ve also looked at the equivalent Australian data and compared that with rival data from Triton based on actual consumption.

Photo above AI generated with Adobe Photoshop using the prompt: “A photorealistic dog counting with an abacus on the kitchen floor“