The focus on the coronavirus and the presidential election all but assured interest on news content would remain high last month. And when the download tally was in hand, Podtrac had the same result as it has every month for the past two years. Once again, the New York Times’ flagship morning news podcast The Daily was the most downloaded and streamed show.
“The thing that's remarkable to me about The Daily's audience is that it's like almost twice as large as the paper was at its peak, and it's only four years old,” New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said on a conference call with investors this week. “The vast majority of the audience is much younger than the traditional audience of the newspaper.” She said the vast majority of The Daily’s audience is under 50, and many are under 40, which helps opens doors to advertisers that the newspaper is normally shut off from.
Kopit Levien said The Daily has also proved to be a useful distribution mechanism for other audio products from the Times. “We can use the speed of The Daily as a way to launch new things into the world, and we think that's going to have real value, both to the ad business and the subs business over time,” she said. Kopit Levien said the podcast has also helped sell newspaper subscriptions. “The program drives affinity,” she said.
The remainder of the top five was also unchanged from a month earlier with The Daily followed by NPR’s hourly five-minute podcast NPR News Now and the NPR-produced Up First, The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show and Barstool Sports’ Call Her Daddy.
But it was news podcasts that ruled in October with the biggest movers from that caetgory. The CNN News Breifing podcast, which releases new episodes in the morning and evening, jumped seven spots from a month earlier and into the top ten last month while the on-demand versionof the Fox News Radio hourly radio newscast returend to the top 20 with a six-spot increase. But the biggest mover was the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. The ESPN/ABC show features political poll guru Nate Silver and the FiveThirtyEight team discussing the latest in politics. There were also gains for the NPR Politics Podcast and Westwood One’s The Dan Bongino Show.
Podtrac said NPR had the most podcasts among the top 20 during October – with seven making the cut. But the ranker mostly included a few one or two shows from an array of publishers.
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