Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore U.S. adults’ views of and experiences with podcasts as a part of the news and information landscape.
To examine the ways Americans get news and information in a digital age, the Center surveyed 5,132 U.S. adults from Dec. 5 to 11, 2022. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
In the questionnaire, U.S. adults who said they are currently listening to at least one podcast were asked in an open-ended question to write in the name of the podcast that they listen to most. If respondents answered with the names of more than one podcast, only the first one was coded. In total, 1,563 open-end responses were coded.
Here are the questions used in the survey, along with responses, and its methodology.
As part of the study, the Center also took a close look at key characteristics of top-ranked podcasts. Researchers identified these top podcasts by analyzing daily lists of the top 200 podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify from April 1 to Sept. 30, 2022. The average chart position of each podcast that appeared on either list was calculated, and the top 300 podcasts from each site were included as top podcasts. Researchers identified 451 top podcasts by combining these lists so that podcasts that were among the top 300 on both sites were not counted twice.
A team of trained researchers then analyzed these 451 podcasts to determine podcast affiliation, topic, format and other key characteristics of each podcast. Additional data on episode length and frequency was analyzed after collecting data on all episodes published in 2022 through the Spotify and Apple Podcasts application programming interface.
Here are the detailed tables for this analysis of 451 top-ranked podcasts, and the methodology.
Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
