Australians downloaded more than half a billion podcasts in 2021, 28 per cent more than the year before, according to statistics released today by Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) and Triton Digital.
The data is part of CRA and Triton’s annual insights on its Australian Podcast Ranker list, which was released yesterday.
The monthly ranker reports the top 100 most popular local and international podcasts in the country among participating publishers across radio, TV, print and independent producers.
Comedy was found to be the most popular podcast genre, with news, society and culture, and true crime following.
Comedy – which includes several radio show catch-up podcasts – accounted for 118.61 million or 22 per cent of the 543 million podcasts downloaded during the year.
However, business podcasts saw quick growth, up 57 per cent to 22.21 million downloads, as well as health and fitness podcasts, which grew 54 per cent to 22.16 million downloads.
Casefile True Crime was the ranker’s top podcast of the year based on 22.3 million downloads, followed by Stuff You Should Know (18.5 million) and Hamish & Andy (18.4 million).
The Kyle & Jackie O Show came in at number four with 16.7 million downloads, while Life Uncut with Brittany Hockley and Laura Byrne rounded out the top five, up from 12th place last year with 11.6 million downloads.
As for the newbies, the best performing debut podcast was Nine Publishing’s The Sure Thing, a six-episode chronicling of Australia’s biggest insider trading case, which scored 426,000 downloads following its launch in March.
“2021 was another stellar year for podcasting as Australians gravitated to comedy and news, and podcasts moved into mainstream consumer conversations,” said CRA chief executive officer, Joan Warner.
“With performance data for each title now publicly available since September, It’s clear that the top shows in the ranker have established sizeable, loyal and growing audiences.
“The plethora of new shows being launched and increased promotion will see momentum continue to build in 2022.”
The podcasts in the ranker attracted 3.7 million weekly listeners in November 2021, an increase of 12 per cent compared to November 2020.
Between January and November 2021, the average listener downloaded 3.3 podcasts and listened to one hour and 54 minutes of content each week. Tuesday was the most popular day of the week to stream or download podcasts.
