TIPPING POINT: COMMERCIAL PODCASTERS TOP PUBLIC MEDIA PODCASTERS • NIELSEN PPM RATINGS FOR MARCH

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It was perhaps inevitable that commercial media podcast publishers would eventually have a larger audience than public media publishers. In the March Podtrac Top 10 publisher rankings, big-dollar corporate publishers combined reached a larger estimated monthly audience than pubcasters. 

In March, the six commercial companies in the Top 10 had an unique monthly audience of 44,955,000. 

Four public media organizations reached 37,662,000. 

Some might say The Daily, published by The New York Times, fits in both categories. 

It is a for-profit company that markets a noncommercial program to public radio stations.  But, even when The Daily is taken out of the equation, the commercial audience is larger.

According to Podtrac, NPR is still the top podcast publisher.  PRX and the This American Life cluster continue to grow. But, in the past year WNYC Studios seemed to loose some of its mojo. APM dropped out of the Top 10.

Commercial publisher Barstool Sports had the biggest percentage gain in March 2019 compared to March 2018. iHeart had the biggest numeric gain during the same period, partially due to its purchase of the How Stuff… cluster of podcasts.  Note that iHeart’s numbers in 2018 include the estimated audience of How Stuff… before the acquisition.

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NIELSEN AUDIO PPM RATINGS FOR NYC, LA, DC & DENVER

Nielsen is now in the process of distributing the March PPM ratings. 

In New York there were very few changes in the noncom rankings, though both WNYC-FM and WQXR appear to be down slightly. 

Of the 47 rated New York station in the March survey, Pacifica’s WBAI was # 43.

This is probably the last month you will WPLJ listed in the Nielsen ratings.   

They were recently sold to EMF and will be a K-LOVE franchise.

In the radio news competition, WNYC-FM remains inches for WCBS-AM in AQH share. 

If you are curious who WKXW is, they are “hot talker” New Jersey 101.5 [link].

The rated noncommercial stations in LA remained about the same as February. 

In estimated weekly listeners, KPCC was down a bit and KCRW was up a bit-and-a-half (that is a technical term, lol).

A fascinating station to watch is commercial talk KFI-AM.   

They continue to add listeners to their audio stream. 

In March the audio stream had115,900 estimated weekly listeners, one of the largest on-line listening totals in the nation. 

Streaming listeners are now 11% of KFI’s weekly cume.

In Washington, DC WTOP and WAMU both increased their AQH shares. 

WAMU’s estimated weekly listeners were slightly up in March.

Commercial conservative talk station WMAL had a significant increase in AQH share.

DC needs a noncom AAA station. A few years ago we were part of a consulting effort to get WAMU to change their HD2 channel to AAA and repeat it on 101.5 FM, now the home of Radio Sputnik.

Finally, the Denver-Boulder March PPM numbers gave us the change to fulfill another 20-year comparison market. 

There has been a lot of change in the Denver market since Spring 1999.

Back then KCFR was a dual format station (NPR News & Classical music). 

KUVO appears to have lost a big chunk of it’s estimated weekly listeners. 

But, please keep in mind the 1999 Denver was using Arbitron Diary methodology and in March 2019, the market is measured by Nielsen PPM methodology.

You might not know some of the 1999 stations on the chart.  

The Pillar of Fire, KPOF-AM, is still dangling sinners over the gates of hell. KWBI is now KDLV. KVCU-AM was a nifty student station at the University of Colorado at Boulder.