BBC Studios Benchmarks Its Podcasts To See How They Really Stack Up

In podcasting, knowing how your audience stacks up against the competition has always been a bit of a guessing game.

And BBC Studios, the content production arm of the British public broadcasting corporation, was tired of guessing.

Around two years ago, BBC Studios started working with digital audio monetization and measurement platform Triton Digital, and benchmarking was at the top of its wish list.

Triton made good on that request on Thursday with the addition of benchmarking features to its Podcast Metrics publisher analytics dashboard.

The new tool lets publishers see how their audience size compares to other podcasts, but stops short of sharing any information about ad performance.

Still, BBC Studios hopes the broader view will help its ad sales team sharpen its pitch to advertisers and court more programmatic demand.

Previously, benchmarking was mostly based on conjecture, said Helen Pendlebury, commercial and business development director for audio at BBC Studios.

“It gave us a general sense of where we stood, but nothing truly comparable or consistent,” she said. “Now, that’s changed completely.”

The benchmarking advantage

Before it was able to benchmark, Pendlebury’s team had a lot of basic questions it couldn’t answer: How were BBC podcasts performing in the broader US market? Which genres were overperforming compared to the competition? And which were underperforming?

First-party data can only tell publishers so much.AdExchanger D

Using Triton’s analytics dashboard, publishers can get benchmark reports by genre and geographic region and also drill down to episode-level performance instead of stopping at the show level.

The extra context helps identify marketplace opportunities BBC’s sales team hadn’t considered before, Pendlebury said.

Most measurement and analytics solutions for the podcast market fall short of giving publishers actionable data for comparing themselves to other publishers, said Daryl Battaglia, SVP of measurement at Triton Digital.

“It’s not like TV where there’s a panel created by a third party to measure everyone’s TV viewing, and that data is put out to everyone,” said Battaglia, who spent 20 years working at Nielsen before joining Triton in 2019.

But Triton “measures a large cross section of the podcast industry globally,” he said, “so we wanted to make use of that data to provide greater insights to our publisher clients.”

Triton pulls data from tens of thousands of podcasts – nearly one billion podcast downloads per month – and from its two podcast hosting platforms, Omny Studio and Spreaker. It can also see server logs from publishers using third-party hosting platforms if they opt in to share it, Battaglia said.

Triton aggregates that data to create genre- and geo-specific audience benchmarks.

Ranking more than just the top pods

The updated Podcast Metrics service now offers more detail than other podcast ranking services, Pendlebury said, even Triton’s own monthly ranking.

While rankers make it easy to understand what the top podcasts are in each market, they have three major limitations, she said. “They say nothing of scale, they completely ignore all podcasts below an arbitrary ‘top podcast’ threshold and they make no distinction between show- and episode-level performance.”

Often, rankers only compile the top 20, 50 or 200 podcasts in a given market – which leaves thousands of podcasts in the dark on where they rank.

Triton’s new benchmarking feature fills those knowledge gaps, Pendlebury said, so publishers can “confidently assess how all their podcasts – even the long tail – perform relative to the wider competitive market, at both a show and an episode level.”

She added that this more wide-ranging view of the marketplace should be a boon for smaller podcasts that aren’t currently accounted for in industry metrics.

“This helps us demonstrate the strength of the BBC podcast portfolio beyond the headline shows, especially where mid‑tier and long‑tail titles overperform within their niches,” she said. “Benchmarking gives us both the language and the evidence to articulate that value more clearly to advertisers.”

Pendlebury also emphasized that the benchmarks are “calculated transparently using real, aggregated data, meaning we don’t have to put our faith in a mysterious black box methodology.”

BBC Studios is using the new feature not only to refine its ad sales pitch, but to also determine which podcasts are resonating with audiences and whether to launch new shows or produce more episodes of certain existing shows.

“We see this as a tool that can strengthen the impact of our portfolio,” Pendlebury said, “and ultimately improve the listener experience.”