Data shows that more and more people listen to podcasts every year, and the platform is especially popular among young adults. According to Podcast Statistics, 158 million people in the U.S. listen to podcasts every month. That’s 55% of the people in the U.S., up from 38% just three years ago.

Two-thirds of people in the U.S. between the ages of 12 and 34 listen to podcasts every month, according to Edison Research. The number is only slightly lower — 61% — for those ages 35-54. For those 55 and older, it’s 38%.

Podcasts are equally popular across the political spectrum, with 56% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats listening to podcasts.

Of course, podcasts cover a variety of topics — true crime, pop culture, comedy — and only a small portion of the 4.52 million podcasts worldwide focus on news. But of those millions of podcasts, it’s the top few thousand that account for the vast majority of listenership, and news and politics make up a strong percentage of those top podcasts.

Fifteen percent of people in the U.S. listen to a news podcast weekly, according to recent data. The increasing number of video podcasts has added to the platform’s popularity, with YouTube now leading Apple and Spotify as the place most people go to find podcasts.

Here at Ad Fontes, our analysts rate both audio and video podcasts every week. We’ve analyzed episodes from more than 900 news shows and have fully rated 800 of them. The July edition of the Podcast/Audio Media Bias Chart® released today includes 44 podcasts (see the full list here).

We choose a selection of podcasts to include on each month’s static media bias chart because it’s impossible to show all of them in one image. In order to make the logos as large and as readable as possible, we’ve magnified a portion of the chart and removed portions around the edges that contain no sources.

Sources in the green box of the chart are recommended by our team to provide minimally biased, fact-based information. On this month’s chart, 11 podcasts fall within the green box: 

• Bloomberg: Odd Lots
• CBC News: The World This Hour
• CBS News Roundup
• GZERO World with Ian Bremmer
• Minnesota Today
• NYT: The Ezra Klein Show
• School of War
• The Editors
• The McCarthy Report
• UNBIASED Politics
• Unchained Podcast

More podcasts fall within the green box, and we’ll feature those on charts in the future.

Six podcasts are included on the chart this month for the first time (two of these fall within the green box):

• Bloomberg: Odd Lots
• I Might Be Wrong
• Keeping It Real Podcast with Jillian Michaels
• Minnesota Today
• Politics Politics Politics
• Strict Scrutiny

Don’t see your favorite podcast on the July chart? You can look up ratings on all sources we’ve analyzed and create custom chart images using our free mobile app available for Apple and Android. You also can access the free version of the interactive chart on the website, which allows access to data on 250 of our top sources. Daily search limits apply.

For expanded access, please consider a News Nerd subscription, which gives you the ability to search all sources we’ve rated and provides many additional benefits.

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