What does it mean to be a “hit” podcast? And is this even a useful concept? To dig into this, we’re going to attempt to rightsize our perspective of podcast audience sizes.

But first, a question about the one podcast that very likely qualifies as a “hit.”

Think about the podcast that has for years been the #1 most popular in the US according to full-market, reach-based charts, like the ones from Triton Digital  and Edison Research. How much of the podcast audience do you think listens to this particular show?

A clear majority? About half?

Actually, it’s much less than that. 

A minority of the US podcast audience – 20% – says they watched or listened to The Joe Rogan Experience in the last month. That’s according to the Triton Digital / Signal Hill Insights Demos+ survey for the fourth quarter of 2025, providing the data behind the Triton Digital US Ranker. And, in fact, that number has been quite stable over time.

Does that surprise you? Did you think the show’s reach would be higher, or lower?

The reason I bring all this up is because recently I’ve had conversations about the reach of popular podcasts with reporters covering podcasting stories, as well as podcast industry insiders. What I’ve heard is that many assume the top ranking podcasts are much bigger and dominant than they really are. 

They express surprise when I share this stat about JRE. In particular, I think the surprise stems from the fact we’ve heard over and over again for years about how the show is the “biggest,” “most popular” or “top” podcast. It’s easy to understand how these characterizations give the impression that a sizeable majority of podcast listeners must be tuning in.

But this post isn’t actually about JRE, nor am I trying to diminish the show’s audience. By any standard, it’s actually massive. Reaching one fifth of the monthly adult podcast audience equals as many as 30 million people, based on the estimate that the total A18+ podcast audience is about 150 million. 

At the same time, the critical thing to understand about The Joe Rogan Experience is that it’s an utterly singular outlier, and pretty much incomparable to any other podcast. On top of Joe Rogan being an outsized personality and widely known celebrity, his show’s audience is far larger any other podcast below it in the charts. A podcast in the #2 position generally has less than half its audience. That proportion goes down to around 10% by the #10 spot. 

To get an even better sense for how exceptional these ratios are, let’s compare to broadcast TV ratings. The #2 ranked TV show reaches 95% as many viewers as #1. The tenth most popular was watched by about 60% as many. 

If a highly ranked podcast has an audience 1/10th the size of Joe Rogan’s, does it qualify as a “hit?” By definition, it certainly is more popular than the #20 or #30 show. But the difference between even #10 and #50 is far smaller than the delta between JRE and #10.  So I really don’t know if that’s a “hit,” or maybe they’re all, “hits.”

Does that even matter? I’m thinking, “no.”

The Problems with the Idea of a “Hit” Podcast

You can probably see that I have problems with the idea of a “hit” podcast, or at least conventional notions of a “hit.” That’s because while podcasting has become a mass medium, in that it reaches a majority of US adults, the truly vast majority of podcasts themselves are far less mass – even those topping the charts. But I happen to think that’s one of podcasting’s great strengths, not a weakness. And, I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Yet, I continue to hear laments about how difficult it is to have a “hit” podcast today compared to a vaunted time when Serial and public radio shows topped the iTunes Chart. Or there are complaints about how “hit” podcasts are dominated by celebrity chatcasts rather than narrative shows. 

(Just to complicate this latter issue even more,  weekly podcast consumers said they spend 56% of their time with narrative shows, according to the Fall 2025 Cumulus Media / Signal Hill Insights Podcast Download.)

One of the misperceptions I suspect is underlying these gripes is a sense that comparatively large, often celebrity-driven, podcasts represent the taste and preferences of more people than they actually do. I also think there’s some underlying, and perhaps unconscious, zero-sum thinking going on. I wonder if there’s an unexpressed fear that shows like New Heights or Smartless are soaking up the available audience and crowding out other types of podcasts – that a new narrative documentary has to run offense against the Kelce brothers.

Without a doubt, I don’t think any of this is quite accurate.

Podcasting’s Long Tail Makes for a More Even Playing Field

You see, podcasting has a very flat “long tail.” That’s what we can conclude from recognizing how even the most popular chart-topping podcasts individually reach only a very small minority of the audience – even if those are relatively big audiences in absolute terms.

What this means is that the attention of some 150 million monthly podcast listeners is spread across a wide and diverse expanse of around 450,000 podcasts in active production. Obviously, it’s not evenly spread, but it’s a much more even playing field than many realize. 

Moreover, we know from The Podcast Landscape 2025 that the monthly podcast audience consumes an average of 3.4 titles regularly.  So even if for a fifth of the audience one of those titles is JRE, that leaves a whole lot of podcast time open for everyone else. 

Another way to look at it is, that no one podcast, or one type of podcast, dominates the medium (remember that weekly podcast consumers themselves say they split their time between narrative and chatcasts). While building and growing an audience is not, and never has been, a trivial endeavor, the opportunity to do so is not fundamentally restricted by competition from chart-topping podcasts.

The Niche Advantage Is To Be Well-Defined

Now, I don’t want to be blithely naïve. I recognize that the most popular podcasts have a marketing and mindshare advantage. They get more media coverage – especially in mainstream outlets. They also are more likely to benefit from word-of-mouth, simply because they have more mouths talking about them. But again, we shouldn’t look at this as a zero-sum game.

Podcasting has long excelled at being a niche medium. Instead of thinking about “niche” as “small,” think about it as “well defined.” A thing successful podcasts do well is address a well-defined audience. Rather than trying to reach everybody, they create for some very specific somebodies. Be top-of-mind for them.

So, if you want to go after the combination football-fan / Swiftie audience, then it’s true that you’re actually competing with New Heights. But even that audience is pretty niche. It’s a bigger niche than some, but still nothing close to the full Super Bowl or Taylor Swift audiences. 

As an experiment, embrace this perspective for a few minutes, and then just run down the podcast chart. Try to define the audience for a handful of podcasts. You’ll quickly see how these very successful shows weren’t designed for a mass audience like Tracker, The Pitt or even MrBeast. 

The power move in podcasting is to understand and create for a specific audience – your well-defined niche. It can be an existing niche that seems underserved, or it might be a niche that has yet to be identified. When you do this, instead of competing head-to-head with other podcasts you’re taking the chance to win over a fresh audience, many of whom may be entirely new to the medium. This is more powerful than trying to create a mass audience “hit” – especially because podcasting continues to grow year over year.

This power is commercial, too. Audio ad agency Oxford Road has been quite vocal in recent months about the value they’re seeing in independent podcasts – some of which are big, while others are definitely in the long tail. Podcast ad networks Libsyn and DAX have also been singing the praise of indie and mid-tier shows.  

It’s not an either / or proposition. The remarkable thing about podcasting is that there is real worth and success to be had across the spectrum, from the top of the chart to the bottom, to the thousands of shows that don’t yet place, but are nevertheless delighting their deeply engaged fans.

Even if I’m challenging the idea of a “hit” podcast, I want to emphasize why there’s undeniable significance in having charts. They really do help to capture trends, emerging content innovations, and rising audience segments – just note the presence of Spanish language podcasts in Triton’s Top 200. It’s healthy and necessary for stakeholders across the podcast industry – podcasters, publishers, advertisers, and agencies included – to know where listeners are directing their eyes and ears.

Ultimately, a “hit” podcast is what you make of it. If it hits the right audience, serving up what they want and need from a podcast, then it’s a “hit.”