Health & Fitness Muscles Its Way To The Week’s Best Download Growth. | Podcast News Daily

The summer season must have podcast listeners thinking about Health & Fitness. Podtrac says it was the genre that had the strongest growth in downloads last week. The category was up four percent over the prior week, and it also had the strongest growth of any genre on a year-to-year basis too – it was up 129% from the same week a year ago.

There was also a gain for a related genre – Sports – it was up one percent week to week.

But while people were thinking about their bodies, their mind-building took a backseat. The Arts genre had the week’s worst numbers – a reversal of a week ago when it posted the best numbers. Podtrac says Arts show downloads fell 24% week-to-week for shows in the category. Other genres that had a drop in downloads included True Crime (-11%), Comedy (-3%), Society & Culture (-3%), Business (-2%), and News (-2%). The Science genre was flat week-to-week, while History downloads rose two percent.

Overall, Podtrac says for the week of May 16-22, downloads for the shows and publishers it measures were down three percent. They were however up 41% on a year-to-year basis.

Podtrac reported earlier that ten of the top 20 publishers it measures had an increase in their unique media audience numbers during April. The top publisher remained iHeartRadio, with more than 441 million downloads and streams and a unique U.S. audience of 31 million. The rest of the top five was also the same: NPR, Wondery, New York Times, and NBC News.

Overall, Podtrac reports the average publisher had a two percent month-over-month decrease in their U.S. unique monthly audience last month. But compared to a year earlier, April 2022’s unique reach for the top 20 publishers was up 16% versus April 2021. 

In terms of downloads, Podtrac says global downloads for the top 20 publishers overall were down five percent month-over-month during April. But they grew 31% compared to the download numbers from a year earlier.