How coronavirus is changing podcast listening

by Dave Zohrob · April 01, 2020 

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted our routines and changed how we consume media. Netflix and YouTube streaming has grown so much that they have to limit bandwidth. Video game live-streaming is way up. Spotify music streaming, on the other hand, has gone down. So—how has the pandemic changed how we listen to podcasts? Voxnest and Acast report downloads trending upward during the pandemic. Podsights reported downloads staying essentially flat, while Podtrac showed downloads and audiences trending slightly down. Focusing on podcast downloads, however, misses a key element of podcast listener behavior—actual listening.Podcast publishers and advertisers trust Chartable to analyze and aggregate many different kinds of data. We see over 530 million IAB-certified downloads a month through our analytics prefix from over 7,000 podcasts. On top of this download stream, we also aggregate listening data from thousands of publishers from both Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters. By looking at these datasets together, we’re able to shed a bit more light on what listeners are actually doing with the podcasts they’re downloading.

https://chartable.com/blog/how-coronavirus-is-changing-podcast-listening