For years, Spotify and Apple have published their own charts showing best-performing podcasts. As a result, when new podcasts debut or older podcasts see a notable spike in listenership, those companies are often cited in articles, simply because they’re the ones providing the data.
YouTube, it seems, is no longer willing to be left out–especially with 1 billion people listening to podcast content on its platform each month.
This morning, as a followup to its annual Brandcast presentation, it revealed the launch of its own weekly podcast charts.
Called Weekly Top Podcast Shows, the chart will update each Wednesday, showing the top 100 podcasts on YouTube by U.S. watch time.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube’s first chart showed The Joe Rogan Experience is its #1 podcast, followed by Kill Tony, Rotten Mango, 48 Hours, The MeidasTouch Podcast, and H3 Show. (More below.)
“Our Weekly Top Podcast Shows chart recognizes and celebrates top podcasters who are redefining the next era of entertainment with engaging, influential, culture-defining shows across a variety of genres like News, Sports, Comedy, and True Crime,” YouTube said in a company blog post.
YouTube is relying on creators to help it collate data for this chart, since Weekly Top Podcast Shows will only count videos “that are designated as ‘podcasts’ by the creator in the upload process,'” it says.
It’s additionally filtering for things like clips of full episodes and Shorts, so those won’t be counted toward shows’ watch time and placement.
Just like at Brandcast, YouTube made this announcement with a healthy dollop of stats, including touting Edison data that shows YouTube is the #1 podcast service in the U.S. And it turns out a lot of that watch time is on TVs: users are listening to/watching over 400 million hours of podcast content per month on living room devices. (Something we’re sure YouTube is thrilled about.)
YouTube describes this release as the first iteration of podcast charts, adding that it plans to build out more features and introduce charts for regions outside the U.S. We hope that for one of those updates, it’ll consider publicly releasing shows’ watch times so we can get a hard number look at their performance the same way we can with video views. (But even video views might not be dependable these days, so who knows.)
Here’s a look at the top 50 podcasts on YouTube, according to its official debut chart:
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