After more than three years atop Podtrac’s monthly ranking of the most listened-to podcasts, The Daily has been dethroned from the top spot. Rising to the top is NPR’s on-demand version of its hourly newscast – billed as NPR News Now in its podcast form – which rose from No. 4 a month earlier. The fall out of first place for The Daily comes just two months after it in October marked five years as the most downloaded show in Podtrac’s monthly rankings. The morning news series slid back to second place in what was a somewhat tumultuous month for publishers as the impact of changes rolled out by Apple in iOS 17 have whacked download numbers. Among the top 20 publishers, downloads were down by nearly a quarter in December versus a year ago.
Besides the NPR News Now podcast pushing sister Up First and NBC News’ true crime series Dateline NBC back one spot month-to-month, the across the board whack of Apple changes brought relatively little movement among the ranking of top shows. Most notable is Scicomm Media’s Huberman Lab, which made its debut on the ranker at No. 15 in November and last month it rose three positions to No. 12.
No one publisher dominates the top 20. Podtrac says NPR had three shows in the top 20 last month and Wondery had two while no other publisher had more than one entry in the ranker.
Overall, among Podtrac’s top 20, December’s average unique monthly audience was down 13% from November, and it was also down 13% from a year earlier.
In terms of downloads, Podtrac says global downloads for the top 20 publishers overall were down 19% month-to-month during December, and they were down 24% compared to a year earlier, due largely to modified download behavior by iOS 17.