Global podcast growth and trends from Omny Studio

To celebrate International Podcast Day 2021, our Managing Director dug through data from our podcast management platform Omny Studio, from the past 12 months to serve up some insights. 

International Podcast Day, 2021! Not sure about you, but the 12 months since we last celebrated have flown by here at Triton Digital (what even is, time?). To mark the occasion, we thought we’d dig through the data that our podcast management platform, Omny Studio has accumulated since last year, and share some of the tastiest morsels we came across with you all. Delicious — let’s dig in! 

Being the enterprise hosting platform to some of the largest podcast publishers around the globe, means that Omny Studio has quite the treasure trove of data to draw insights from. In fact, since International Podcast Day last year, we’ve served over 4 billion downloads in more than 80 countries around the world. That’s millions of episodes and over 650,000 hours of audio created on our platform, bringing podcasting to listeners around the world. 

From all that content being created and downloaded, we crunched the numbers to bring you the following insights into the world of podcasting, and to answer some of the most frequently asked where, what, and how questions around the burgeoning global medium. 

Where in the world is content hosted on Omny, consumed? 

First up, the basics — where in the world is all this content being listened to? And is the current top 10 list different from a year ago? 

Source: Omny Studio hosted content delivered in August 2020 and 2021 

The U.S. holds the top spot accounting for close to 60% of all downloads since Podcast Day 2020. But, while the US is still growing in double digits year-over-year, by no means did they see the biggest jump in growth. No, that spot is held by Iran who grew over 3500%, followed by Turkey (552% growth) then India (524% growth). 

As for the rest, there are an astounding number of countries seeing triple-digit growth year-over-year. Some standouts are below. 

Source: Omny Studio hosted content delivered in August 2020 and 2021 

What Omny hosted content is the most popular? 

So, now we know where they’ve been listening, how about what they’ve been listening to? Across the 44,000 shows hosted on Omny Studio, the majority of downloads continue to fall into a handful of categories. 

Source: Omny Studio hosted content delivered in the 12 months from September 30 2020 

Not surprising to see News and Comedy as frontrunner categories given the year that we’ve had. A big hello to all my fellow lock downers during the pandemic who didn’t pick up a Health & Fitness interest whilst confined to 4 walls — never too late to start a new hobby! 

Interestingly, when we look at the categories that have garnered the largest advertising spend programmatically over the last year, we see a few slight shifts. 

Source: Triton Digital programmatic advertising delivered in the 12 months from September 30 2020 

How are Omny hosted podcasts being consumed? 

Finally, we dug into the data around how podcast listening was happening around the world. What devices and platforms were used to consume this content? 

Globally, the platform competition for ears is holding steady amongst the usual contenders. 

Source: Omny Studio hosted content delivered in the 12 months from September 30 2020. 

I said earlier this year that the bucket I’d be keeping an eye on is “other”. Whilst we haven’t seen any big shift in the cumulative total percentage listening here, there are a number of standouts that caught my eye. 

• Amazon Music: Having launched only a week before last year’s International Podcast Day (making comparing the two time periods challenging), they made up just under half a percent of all Omny downloads in the past 12 months. A massive 13% of the total downloads we saw were from August 2021 alone, so definitely a platform to watch. 
• Facebook: An even newer entrant to the space, who have only just started rolling out to shows in the US. Facebook plays of Omny-hosted content make up just under one percent of our total downloads for the year — another one to watch very closely, I predict this is going to shake up a lot of podcast marketing strategies. 

• Instagram, Snapchat and others: In contrast to Facebook whose share of downloads are expected to increase, Instagram numbers have typically been flat and quite low. If Facebook changes the way publishers think about using social media for their show, I wonder if Instagram will see a natural bump in downloads soon? 
• Geographic-specific apps: Wynk Music, Gaana, JioSaavn, Deezer, Himalaya and iVoox are just a few highly used apps in certain regions which we’re seeing gain ground and are the drivers of growth in the “other” category above. With dedicated listener bases and users already, could they do in specific countries what Spotify have been able to do in the western world? Probably. Should western publishers ensure their content is available on them? Definitely. Are they? … next question. 

Lastly, a shout out to Winamp from my 17-year-old self, good to see them fighting the good fight as our 63rd most seen User Agent. 

Let’s not forget the devices! What has changed there since we looked last? 

 Source: Omny Studio hosted content delivered in the 12 months from September 30 2020 

As usual, not too many surprises here. Mobile continues to dominate and grow but desktop has clawed back some of their share from the drop we saw between 2019 and 2020. 

That’s a wrap 

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this little ‘celebrate by numbers’ treat on International Podcast Day 2021. If there’s one thing better than the amazing content being created by publishers all around the globe, it’s the analytics — especially when the numbers continue to paint a picture of incredible growth and awareness worldwide! 

If you’re a Triton Digital client using Omny Studio and would like to learn more about how your podcast compares to what we see in the industry, reach out at any time. 

Happy podcasting, everyone!