More Australians are tuning into podcasts than ever before, but growth in the first six months of this year slowed down from a 30.5 per cent surge in the same period in 2023.
The average monthly audience grew by 8.7 per cent, with society and culture (4.5 million listeners), true crime (3.9 million) and news (3.8 million) the most popular categories, according to research by Commercial Radio & Audio and Triton Digital.
Also pulling in good numbers are comedy (3.5 million) and sports (2.9 million), while at the other end of the spectrum are pods about religion & spirituality (which were downloaded 109,000 times).
Sixty per cent of podcast shows were downloaded more than 100,000 times with 12.1 per cent hitting the 1 million-plus download mark.
Podcast listeners tend to skew young, over-indexing in the 18-24 year old demographic by 149 and are wealthier, indexing by 127 versus the general population of household incomes of $150,000 and more.
The most popular times to listen to podcasts are in the morning (between 7am and 9am) and evening (5pm to 6pm).
Here are some other trends noted in the report:
