Podtrac – which provides a weekly indicator of which way the podcast industry points each week with release of download figures for the publishers it measures – says the arrow was pointing up last week. For the week of July 25-31, Podtrac says downloads and streams among those publishers increased two percent from a week earlier. And they were up 69% from the corresponding week a year ago.
Three different genres can claim victories last week. The History and Society & Culture categories showed the strongest week-over-week growth – both were up six percent from a week earlier. But it was the Health & Fitness genre that had the biggest growth numbers versus a year ago. Podtrac says they were up 179% for the show category that has had some of the best download numbers since the spring.
Health & Fitness and Business were both up four percent week-to-week. Podtrac also reports gains for genres including True Crime (+3%), Sports (+3%), and News (-1%) while a handful of categories had softer download numbers last week, including Science (-19%) and Arts (-3%).
Podtrac earlier reported that iHeartRadio was the top publisher in June among those it measures. It was followed by Wondery, NPR, the New York Times and NBC News. Overall, Podtrac says the average U.S. unique monthly audience for the top 20 publishers was up five percent in June compared to May. And in terms of downloads, Podtrac says global downloads for the top 20 publishers overall increased three percent month-over-month.
The New York Times-produced The Daily remained the most listened-to show in June among the publishers measured by Podtrac. Wondery’s Morbid: A True Crime Podcast was second, followed by The Daily Wire’s conservative talk The Ben Shapiro Show at third, NPR’s hourly five-minute podcast NPR News Now in fourth place and the public radio network’s morning news podcast Up First in fifth place.