The New Year’s holiday week download tally looks a lot like Christmas week. Podtrac says downloads for the publishers it measures were down three percent week-to-week for Dec. 27 to Jan. 2. But just like the prior week, downloads were actually up compared to a year ago. It says downloads were up 22% over the corresponding period last year for Podtrac measured shows.
During Christmas week (Dec. 20-26) Podtrac reported earlier that downloads declined 13% week-to-week but were up 32% compared to the corresponding week a year earlier.
If trends hold, the next few weeks will likely bring a double-digit bounce back in downloads. Last year the week after New Year’s brought about a five percent increase in downloads followed by a 21% jump a week later.
Even though downloads overall were softer last week, some genres saw growth. Most notable was the History category that showed a 13% increase in downloads week-to-week. There was also a 10% bump up for shows in the Religion & Spirituality genre and a 2% increase for the Science category. Week-to-week declines were logged in genres including News (-4%), Comedy (-4%), Arts (-4%), Society & Culture (-2%), and True Crime (-2%) during the New Year’s holiday.
Podtrac earlier reported that for the month of November, iHeartRadio was the top publisher with nearly 337 million downloads and streams and a U.S. monthly unique audience of 32.6. It was followed by NPR, Wondery, the New York Times and The Walt Disney Co. as the top five publishers were the same in November as October. Overall, Podtrac said global downloads for the top 20 were flat during November compared to a month earlier. And they were on par with download numbers of a year earlier.