What Are the Top Podcasts Right Now?

By Seth Freilich | Miscellaneous | December 16, 2023 |

By Seth Freilich | Miscellaneous | December 16, 2023 |

Late last month, Apple and Spotify each published their top podcasts of the year lists. Apple spit out their top 10 in the US, while Spotify told us the top 25 globally. Ten-to-twenty-five podcasts aren’t really enough to learn anything insightful, and it’s hard to parse their lists because of different audience demographics, a few Spotify-exclusive podcasts, etc. So, I decided to take a different approach. For science. Except that this is much more art and throwing-shit-against-the-wall than any real science. If you care about some of the details of the podcasting business and why it’s more art than science, The Ringer’s ‘The Town’ podcast recently had a good discussion about a lot of this.

Earlier this month, I used Chartable’s Apple and Spotify charts to see what was popular in the US at the moment. That gave me a total of 162 podcasts. Obviously, there will be day-to-day fluctuations based on the zeitgeist, holidays, etc. For example, while the Kelce brothers’ ‘New Heights’ is flourishing because of the football season coupled with a robust Taylor Swift boost, it surely wasn’t ranked as high as it is currently (4th on both lists) back in April. In fact, it wasn’t on either Apple or Spotify’s top 10 lists for the year.

Let’s look at some lists!

Top 25 Podcasts. OK, so here’s my list of what I think are kinda sorta(ish) the top podcasts of the year, blending both Spotify and Apple’s year-end lists with the Chartable lists from earlier this month. Again, let’s all understand and agree that this is total hokum, but so is most podcast measurement at this point (as Matt Belloni on that ‘The Town’ episode noted, Spotify won’t even tell him what his podcast numbers are, and they own and distribute his podcast via The Ringer).

1. The Joe Rogan Experience
2. Mortal Sin
3. The President’s Daily Brief
4. Who Killed JFK?
5. New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce
6. Huberman Lab
7. Tosh Show
8. The Bakersfield Three
9. What Now? With Trevor Noah
10. anything goes with emma chamberlain
11. On Purpose with Jay Shetty
12. Crime Junkie
13. The Daily
14. Call Her Daddy
15. Dateline NBC
16. Crime Junkie
17. This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
18. SmartLess
19. This American Life
20. Morbid
21. Up First
22. Serial Killers
23. Hidden Brain
24. The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
25. Stuff You Should Know

And what does this tell us? Not much, really. As Belloni notes, Apple’s audience tends to skew older and toward true crime, while Spotify’s audience skews younger and toward more personality-driven shows. That can be seen on their individual lists as well as on my Very Scientifically Accurate list here, which similarly leans heavily toward those categories. Of important note (another caveat, if you will), all of this completely ignores YouTube viewership/listenership, and that platform is of increasing importance in the podcast ecosystem with both user advantages (discoverability) and producer advantages (video ads tend to pay much better).

What was more interesting to me was to pull that thread a little more, and cut the data by genre.

Top Podcast Genres. Here, I chucked the year-end lists and used Chartable’s top 100 lists for each of Apple and Spotify for a specific day. From those two lists, there were a combined 162 individual podcasts. (Again, that only 38 podcasts appear on both lists shows you how difficult it is to have a view of the full podcast ecosystem.) I always knew True Crime was popular, but holy hell, look at this:

A full 20% (33 out of 162) of the podcasts fall into this genre. Now sure, Society & Culture isn’t that far behind; however, I used that as a real catch-all. Chartable slots many podcasts into more than one genre, but I unscientifically chose what felt like the dominant genre to me and, for a lot of the podcasts, Society & Culture just worked best. Of note, many of those qualify as personality-driven podcasts (same with many of the Comedy podcasts), so this tracks with what we were talking about earlier.

A few other surprises here:

• I was a little surprised that the Comedy-Interview podcasts weren’t higher up, as those feel almost ubiquitous at this point.
• On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by so many (relatively) History (7), Science (5), and Technology (4) podcasts showing up. Combined, they account for almost 10% of the total podcasts. Sure, True Crime still has twice that, but it’s honestly at least 2x higher than I would’ve expected.
• But then, in the realm of disappointing (but not surprising), this serves as a friendly reminder that while I, many of my friends, and (I suspect) many of you listen to a lot of TV & Movie podcasts (Podjiba, ever heard of it?), they are not widely and generally consumed. There are no movie podcasts on the list and one lone TV podcast (Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide, a rewatch/recap podcast of an early 2000s Nickelodeon show).

Before we go, there was one other thing I was curious about.

Top Podcast Producers. Are there any producers who are dominating the space? Turns out … sort of. A lot of podcasts have co-productions - for example, ‘The Journal,’ a news podcast, is produced by both The Wall Street Journal and Gimlet. Counting co-productions toward both producing entities, here’s who had more than one podcast on that list of 162:

iHeart is the clear leader with 10 podcasts, and when you combine them with Wondery, Spotify, and The New York Times, they account for almost 15% (24 podcasts) of the market. Of course, that number grows some if you were to also include other Spotify-owned productions that are under a different banner like Gimlet (which had two on the list, ‘The Journal’ and ‘Science Vs’), The Ringer (with only one on the list, unfortunately being ‘The Bill Simmons Podcast’), their exclusives like Joe Rogan and Dax Shepard’s podcasts, etc.

I was a little surprised to see so many with iHeart attached, frankly, but I was more surprised that there isn’t a dominant True Crime publisher (audiochuck being the closest out of this list). However, I also found this list weirdly comforting - in a day where so many of our content spaces are dominated by just a few producers and distributors, it’s kind of nice to see that the vast, vast majority of top podcasts are still (relatively) smaller productions. How many of them can stay successful, commercially, well that’s very much an open question across the podcast industry right now.

At the end of the day, what’s the point of all this? I mean, without real, meaningful data, not much. But I wanted something to do while catching up on the latest episode of ‘House of R’ (you do listen to our friends Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin’s super nerdy and exhaustive discussions, don’t you?!). And mission accomplished.