Powered by the sort of promotion that money cannot buy, Serial was all over the news last month as the subject of its breakout season, Adnan Syed, walked out of jail and the show released a 16-minute update to season one with an episode titled “Adnan is out.” The result was Serial returned to Podtrac’s list of top 20 shows for September, jumping to No. 13 – up from No. 80 in August.
Fellow New York Times-produced The Daily remained the most listened-to show last month according to Podtrac. In fact the top six shows were all the same in September as during August. Wondery’s Morbid: A True Crime Podcast, which entered the Podtrac ranking at No. 2 in June, held onto that position for a fourth consecutive month. It was followed by the NPR morning news podcast Up First, NPR’s hourly five-minute podcast NPR News Now, the NBC News podcast version of Dateline NBC, and The Daily Wire’s conservative talk The Ben Shapiro Show.
Among the top ten, Wondery’s SmartLess slid back to No. 9 and that allowed iHeartRadio’s Stuff You Should Know to move up to No. 7 and Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take to rise to No. 8. Exactly Right Media’s My Favorite Murderrounded out the top ten.
Among the shows losing ground last month were CNN’s 5 Things podcast, which fell three places to No. 16. And Vox Media’s Today, Explained, which dropped out of the top 20.
NPR had the most shows on Podtrac’s list of top 20 shows for August. It had four make the grade. Wondery and the New York Times each had two. No other publisher had more than one.
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