News

Canadians averaging 8.2 podcast episodes per week

Connie Thiessen
June 04, 2024

Triton Digital has released its second Canadian Podcast Trends Report offering a snapshot of the podcast listener, top genres, downloads, and debuts.

The report considered shows and podcast networks measured by Triton’s Podcast Metrics over the past year across categories including Top Overall, Top Canadian-made English and Canadian-made French.

It found monthly podcast listening continues to grow, with faster growth among francophone listeners, which has increased by 65% over the past three years.

Canadians, 18+, averaged 3.6 podcasts per week and 8.2 episodes, with weekly listeners consuming 5.9 hours of podcasts. That’s up from Triton’s 2023 Mid-Year Podcast Trends Report which found Canadians listened to an average of three hours of podcast content per week, equating to an average 4.4 episodes weekly. 

The overwhelmingly majority of podcasts (92.9%) were downloaded to a mobile device, followed by desktop/laptop at 2.7%. Smart speakers made up just 1.9% of listening. YouTube was the top platform used to access podcasts in the past year and the top platform for discovery, with 43% of listeners first listening in the past year. 

According to the report, Canada’s most popular podcast genres were True Crime (18% of downloads), followed by Comedy and News, which each account for 16% of downloads. Those genres average 5.9 hours of content downloaded per listener, per week.

Top podcasts overall included Dateline NBC (NBCUniversal News Group), SmartLess (Wondery Network), and Crime Junkie (audiochuck), while the top Canadian-made English language podcasts were Front Burner (CBC/Radio-Canada), The World This Hour (CBC/Radio-Canada), and The Current (CBC/Radio-Canada). The top Canadian-made French language podcasts were Le Radiojournal (Radio Canada), Les chroniques de Pierre-Yves McSween (Cogeco Media), and Richard Martineau (QUB).

The top sales networks included in the Triton Canada Podcast Ranker, in terms of average weekly download volume, were SiriusXM Podcast Network, followed by Wondery Network and CBC/Radio-Canada.