Leading podcast publishers in the U.S. 2021, by monthly unique audience

In September 2021, iHeart Radio had 30.02 million audience members in the United States. A ranking of the unique monthly audience of the most popular podcast publishers showed that National Public Radio came second with 20.52 million. The two publishers consistently battle for the top spot and generally have more listeners each than NBC, Wondery, and Barstool Sports combined.

Podcast streaming market

While publishers play an important role in the creation of podcasts, streaming services providing a platform for podcast consumption also benefit from the rising popularity of the format. In 2020, the preferred podcasts providers were Spotify, followed by Apple Podcast, Pandora and iHeartRadio, exceeding the popularity of Sirius XM, Stitcher and Wondery. Considering the revenue generated by streaming services through podcast streaming in 2019, Spotify is the clear market leader with a revenue of 7.5 billion U.S. dollars, followed by Stitcher and Wondery. Streaming services have realized the potential of podcasts, which is why they have started to invest in podcast creating and podcast streaming companies. In 2020, Spotify acquired The Ringer while competitor Sirius XM, after having purchased Pandora, obtained the successful podcast streaming service Stitcher. So far, these acquisitions seem to have proven successful, since Spotify is estimated to overtake Apple Podcast in terms of monthly podcast listeners in 2021.

Popular podcast content

In terms of content, the most popular genres within the podcast market in the U.S. are comedy followed by news and true crime. The podcasts with the highest revenue worldwide in 2019 were The Joe Rogan Experience, a Spotify-exclusive podcast hosted by the American comedian of the same name in which he talks to a wide array of guests, and My Favorite Murder, a bi-weekly true crime comedy podcast hosted by the American comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark in which they discuss true crime cases. While podcasts were already on the rise over the last few years, there has been an upsurge in podcast consumption during the last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, which meant a higher demand in audio, or entertainment in general, content.