Podtrac says iHeartPodcasts remained the biggest publisher in December, leading among those it measures by a comfortable margin. With 827 active shows, iHeart had 148 million downloads and streams and a unique U.S. audience of 27.9 million. The Walt Disney Company — whose shows include those produced by ABC News and ESPN — remained the second biggest individual publisher last month. Disney had 6.8 million unique listeners and 23.1 million downloads. Vox Media ranked third, with 5.5 million listeners and 17.2 million downloads.
The holiday season brought bigger-than-usual disruptions to podcast listening patterns as Podtrac says only one of the U.S. publishers it measures had an increase in unique listeners. This American Life managed to squeeze out a 1% month-to-month increase. But with just one show, it isn’t the typical publisher.
Among the sales networks measured by Podtrac, the iHeart Audience Network led in the U.S. with 316.2 million downloads to the more than 20,000 shows it reps to advertisers around the globe, and 61.2 million unique listeners. Acast ranked second with 21.2 million unique listeners. It was followed by Libsyn with 20.3 million, and NPR with 17.9 million. The ranker no longer includes Wondery, which had been in third place in November.
The numbers were also softer on a global basis, as Podtrac says all the global publishers and ad networks it measured showed month-to-month audience declines in December vs. November as the holiday season’s effects were felt worldwide.
The iHeart Audience Network, which had nearly 627.9 million global streams, downloads and video views around the world in December, again led the ranking by a wide margin with month-to-month audience gains. That included about 109 million YouTube views for the 75 podcasts in the iHeart network that also make their shows available on the streaming video service.
Acast held second place with 406.3 million global streams and downloads in December.
Third-place Libsyn slid to 159.4 million global downloads, streams and views. Sonora Global Media was fourth with 96 million, and Paramount was the fifth-biggest global podcast network overall last month with 57.2 million global downloads, streams and views.
Podtrac says the top five shows among the publishers it measures was led by NPR’s on-demand hourly newscast, which pushed The New York Times’ morning news series The Daily back to second place. They were followed by NPR’s morning news series Up First, with Dateline NBC and the on-demand version of Fox News’ hourly newscast rounding out the top five.