FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Glen Mills, PA (January 23, 2026) – Edison Research announces the Top 50 Podcasts in the U.S. based on reach for Q4 2025 among weekly podcast consumers ages 13+. The list ranks podcasts based on total audience reach from Edison Podcast Metrics.
The top five podcasts remain in the same rank order as Q3 2025: The Joe Rogan Experience, Crime Junkie, The Daily, Call Her Daddy, and SmartLess. Stuff You Should Know and This American Life make notable jumps. The rankings below show rank changes in parentheses.
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- Crime Junkie
- The Daily
- Call Her Daddy
- SmartLess
- Stuff You Should Know (+4)
- This American Life (+5)
- This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von (-2)
- Dateline NBC (-1)
- New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce (-3)
And the award goes to…
The winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Podcast has climbed the Edison charts quickly since its premiere in March of 2025. Good Hang with Amy Poehler reaches a new high at #38.
Notably, many shows in the Edison Podcast Metrics Top 25 were missing from the eligibility list for the Golden Globes: This American Life, New Heights, Bad Friends, The Breakfast Club, Radiolab, The MeidasTouch Podcast, Million Dollaz Worth of Game, TED Talks Daily, My Favorite Murder and Club Shay Shay.
In the Top 50 for the first time: The Diary Of A CEO, after bubbling under the Top 50 for several quarters, breaks into the Top 50 for the first time. The 85 South Show and Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce also make their debuts.
Notable decline: After peaking at #17 last quarter, The Charlie Kirk Show saw a large drop, falling 30 ranks.
Interviews were conducted continuously throughout the quarter in English and Spanish. Rankings are based on average weekly consumption over the full period. All respondents reported listening to a podcast or watching a podcast in the last week.
About Edison Podcast Metrics:
The podcast show ranker is derived from data collected continuously during the first quarter of 2025, interviewing 5,086 weekly podcast consumers ages 13 and older in the U.S. Participants indicate which podcasts they listened to or watched in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic, and purchase-behavior information. This ranker measures reach as a percentage of the weekly podcast audience.
For more information on how to become a subscriber to the full datasets, please contact info@edisonresearch.com.
About Edison Research:
Edison Research conducts survey research and provides strategic information to a broad array of clients worldwide, having conducted research in 66 countries. Edison Research’s The Infinite Dial® series has been the survey of record for digital audio, social media, podcasting, smart speakers, and other media-related technologies since 1998. The company’s Share of Ear® survey is the only single-source measure of all audio in the U.S. Edison Research is the leading podcast research company in the world, producing the only survey-based data on the podcast audience in the U.S, Edison Podcast Metrics, and has conducted research for many companies in the space. Edison Research is part of SSRS.
