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  • Edison Podcast Metrics UK Q3 2023

    The latest Edison Podcast Metrics UK have just been published for Q3 2023. What has changed? Well Joe Rogan still tops the charts, while The Rest Is Politics climbs to number two pushing The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett down to number three (not number 90). Edison Research notes the following: Edison Podcast…

    Edison Podcast Metrics UK Q3 2023
  • Books Update

    It has been ages since I wrote about the books I’ve been reading recently. So let’s have a canter through them. City of Silk by Glennis Virgo is set in sixteenth century Bologna, and we follow the story of Elena, a talented seamstress who has figuratively and literally escaped from the Baraccano orphanage. She dreams…

  • More UK Podcast Charts

    More UK Podcast Charts

    NOTE: I’ve added a significant update below (22/11/24) You know that I love a list! Well over the past few days, a couple more podcast charts for the UK have emerged. First, Podtrac has released its October 2024 chart for the UK and a number of other countries. I dug deeper into Podtrac’s first chart…

  • Did Podcasts Win the US Presidential Election?

    Did Podcasts Win the US Presidential Election?

    In short: we don’t know. There have been several pieces that speak of the presumed importance of podcasts in the 2024 US Presidential Election. Even Elon Musk says as much. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Let’s start with a few figures. 47% of Americans listen to podcasts every month, and 34%…

  • More on Podtrac: Australia

    More on Podtrac: Australia

    This is a follow-up to a piece I just published which looked at the newly launched Podtrac ranker for the UK and compared it with Edison Research’s equivalent ranker. Even allowing for the variability of these kinds of things with different methodologies, there were some profoundly questionable results. And to be clear, recall surveys like…

  • A New UK Podcast Ranker

    A New UK Podcast Ranker

    Last week Podtrac announced the availability of its podcast tracker in 30 countries including the UK. Podtrac has for a while been publishing US figures including a list of Top Podcast and Top Publishers, but this is an opt-in methodology. In other words, the publishers that appear on those lists have chosen to let Podtrac…

  • Sports Disappearing from Free-to-Air TV

    Sports Disappearing from Free-to-Air TV

    There were a couple of bits of news over the last week or so that have continued a trend that seems to have only grown in recent years – the disappearance of live sport from free-to-air TV. First came news that Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has signed an exclusive deal with the European Broadcasting Union…

  • RAJAR Q3 2024

    RAJAR Q3 2024

    This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the many years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I am delighted that I continue to be able to bring you this RAJAR analysis in association with RALF. For more details on the product, contact Deryck Pritchard via…

  • The Podcast Listener Landscape – Acast/Nielsen

    The Podcast Listener Landscape – Acast/Nielsen

    Acast has just published some research carried out by Nielsen in the UK based on podcast listening, called The Podcast Listener Landscape. The research dives into the role of podcasting in UK media, how people engage with podcasts and what listeners attitudes are towards podcasts. The full report is available on request from Acast. According…

  • RAJAR MIDAS Report – Summer 2024

    RAJAR MIDAS Report – Summer 2024

    [UPDATE – 2 October: After I asked a question about the Need States chart, RAJAR published a revised version of the Podcast chart, and this is now included below.] RAJAR has just published a summary of its Summer 2024 MIDAS report. The research was carried out amongst 2,048 previous RAJAR respondents across two weeks in…

  • Battlelines: Sky, HBO & Max in the UK

    Battlelines: Sky, HBO & Max in the UK

    I’m fascinated to see how Sky manages the seemingly inevitable launch of Max as a streaming brand in the UK. Things came to a head this week as Sky launched a lawsuit against Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) accusing it of a contract breach, in large part because of how a new Harry Potter series is…

  • Testing Google’s NotebookLM with RAJAR

    Testing Google’s NotebookLM with RAJAR

    Google has a recent-ish AI tool called NotebookLM. The idea is that you throw a lot of information into it, and it can sift through it, answer questions based on what you’ve told it and so on. Recently they added the ability to auto-generate a podcast! So I decided to test it. I gave it…

  • Edison Podcast Metrics UK – Top 25 Q2 2024

    Edison Podcast Metrics UK – Top 25 Q2 2024

    The latest Edison Research Podcast Metrics for the UK has just been published with a top 25 based on reach during Q2 2024 This follows previous releases for Q1 2024, Q4 2024, Q3 2024 and Q2 2024. The top four podcast remain the same and in the same order this quarter. Then we get a certain amount of re-shuffling…

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