Podtrac on October 7, 2026 published its September rankings of podcast publishers and networks, with iHeart Audience Network first in both the US table and the global multi-channel table. According to Podtrac, eight of the US ranking participants recorded more US downloads than in August, and eleven recorded a larger unique monthly audience. September is also the first complete calendar month since YouTube changed how it counts a view on August 24, 2026.

In Short

Podtrac, a company that measures podcast listening, released its monthly league tables for September 2026 on October 7. iHeart sits at the top of both the US and the global list, but second place globally goes to Meidas Media Network, whose count is mostly video views from three shows rather than audio downloads, and that matters because the global list adds audio and video into one number. September is also the first full month since YouTube changed how it counts views, so month-to-month comparisons of the video columns carry an extra caveat.

What Podtrac published on October 7

Podtrac's blog post carries a timestamp of 11:21 am on October 7, 2026. It points to three rankings: Top US Publishers & Networks, Top Global Multi-Channel Publishers & Networks and Top US Podcasts. The material supplied to PPC Land includes the post and the first two tables. The show-level Top US Podcasts table was not part of it, so individual programmes fall outside this report.

The post's highlights run to two sentences. Podtrac states: "Eight of the US ranking participants were up on US Downloads in September over August." A second line reads: "Eleven of the US rankings participants UMA were up in September over August." Neither line names the entities concerned, and the tables themselves carry only September figures, which leaves the August baseline to other sources.

A participation rule closes the US table. According to Podtrac, the ranking "only includes publishers that participate in Podtrac measurement" for the full month being reported. Publishers outside the programme, or measured for part of a month, do not appear. The table is therefore a ranking of Podtrac's participants rather than of the US market as a whole.

The US table

Headed "US Audience: September 2026", the table ranks 19 entries on three measures: US unique monthly audience (UMA), US unique streams and downloads, and active shows. A sales contact is listed for each row; iHeartRadio appears against both iHeart entries and National Public Media against NPR. The order of the rows follows audience in every case, not volume. DailyWire+ ranks tenth on audience, for example, yet its 20,418,000 downloads and streams exceed the 19,533,000 recorded by seventh-placed Barstool Sports.

Three rows carry an asterisk marking a Sales Network: iHeart Audience Network, NPR Sales Network and Libsyn. Podtrac defines the term as an entity that sells advertising in an aggregated network of podcasts it may or may not own, and adds that "A Sales Network may include Podcast Publishers." The list thus mixes companies that make shows with companies that sell advertising against shows made elsewhere, and the categories can overlap.

Leaders and movement against August

iHeart Audience Network is first with a unique monthly audience of 57,562,000, 285,627,000 unique streams and downloads and 32,741 active shows. iHeartPodcasts follows with 31,960,000, 162,301,000 and 931. NPR Sales Network is third (18,011,000; 93,738,000; 73 shows) and Libsyn fourth (12,681,000; 42,342,000; 620). The documents do not say whether the shows behind iHeartPodcasts also feed the Audience Network row, so the two cannot be summed with confidence.

Fifth to seventh place is tight. Walt Disney Co. (6,925,000), Vox Media (6,721,000) and Barstool Sports (6,633,000) sit within 292,000 audience members of one another.

August figures are absent from the supplied documents. According to Radio Online, which reported the August table on September 9, the two iHeart rows moved as follows. The percentage changes are PPC Land calculations.

EntryMeasureAugustSeptemberChange
iHeart Audience NetworkUnique monthly audience58,875,00057,562,000-2.2%
iHeart Audience NetworkStreams and downloads266,850,000285,627,000+7.0%
iHeart Audience NetworkActive shows26,59832,741+23.1%
iHeartPodcastsUnique monthly audience31,112,00031,960,000+2.7%
iHeartPodcastsStreams and downloads150,106,000162,301,000+8.1%
iHeartPodcastsActive shows947931-1.7%

The show count at the Audience Network rose by 6,143 in a month. Nothing in the Podtrac documents explains the increase, and the audience figure for the same row fell. Radio Online's August numbers also give audience changes for three more entries: NPR Sales Network 18,116,000 to 18,011,000 (-0.6%), Libsyn 13,701,000 to 12,681,000 (-7.4%) and Vox Media 6,851,000 to 6,721,000 (-1.9%). Vox was fifth in August and is sixth now, with Disney taking fifth place.

Of those five entries, only iHeartPodcasts rose on audience. Podtrac's count of eleven risers therefore sits mostly further down the table: if one of the five checked entries rose, ten of the remaining fourteen rows did. September also has 30 days to August's 31, which handicaps the raw monthly totals slightly. On a per-day basis, streams and downloads at the Audience Network averaged about 9.52 million against 8.61 million in August (+10.6%), and at iHeartPodcasts about 5.41 million against 4.84 million (+11.7%).

Podtrac's own tally of risers has varied from month to month. In its August report, published on September 8, the company counted eight participants up on US downloads and eighteen up on audience. September repeats the first number and drops the second to eleven.

A longer view comes from earlier coverage of iHeartMedia's second-quarter results, which cited June ranking figures of 267.6 million monthly downloads and 55.1 million monthly audience for the iHeartAudienceNetwork sales arm. Set against those, September's 285,627,000 streams and downloads is 6.7% higher and the 57,562,000 audience 4.5% higher, although the column labels differ slightly between months and the comparison is approximate.

Downloads per listener and a DailyWire+ anomaly

Dividing the streams-and-downloads column by the audience column gives a rough measure of how much each unique listener consumed. NPR Sales Network records 5.20, iHeartPodcasts 5.08 and iHeart Audience Network 4.96, with Blaze Media (4.31), DailyWire+ (3.99) and Versant (3.96) next. At the lower end sit PRX (2.48), ReVolver Podcasts (2.39) and This American Life (1.83). These ratios are PPC Land calculations, and since the table ranks on aggregate totals, the number of shows matters as much as their pull: the 32,741 shows at the Audience Network average about 8,700 streams and downloads each, while the 13 shows at DailyWire+ average about 1.57 million.

One cross-table check does not reconcile. DailyWire+ shows 20,418,000 US unique streams and downloads in the US table but 19,261,000 worldwide audio downloads and streams in the global table, a US figure 1,157,000 (6.0%) above the worldwide one. The definitions differ, since the US column counts unique streams and downloads while the global column counts total audio downloads and streams, yet a US-only count above a worldwide count is not what the stated definitions would lead a reader to expect. Podtrac does not address it. For the other 14 entries appearing in both tables, the US figure runs from 56.3% (ReVolver Podcasts) to 89.6% (Fox Audio Network) of the global audio figure; iHeart Audience Network sits at 62.5% and NPR Sales Network at 86.7%.

The global multi-channel table

The second table, headed "Global Multi-Channel Ranking: September 2026", lists 18 entries. Podtrac describes its rank as a ranking of participating publishers and networks "based on downloads, streams and views of full podcast episodes across all podcast distribution channels as measured by Podtrac." The columns split a combined total into audio downloads and streams, with a count of audio shows, and video views and streams, with a count of video shows. The video columns combine engaged views reported by YouTube with streams reported by Spotify.

Three further columns report Video Podcast Clips on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Podtrac states that views of such clips "are not included in Podtrac Rank", so these columns sit beside the ranking rather than inside it.

Concentration at the top

Summing the 18 totals gives 1,165,122,000, a figure that describes the table rather than any market. Within it, iHeart Audience Network accounts for 529,089,000, or 45.4%. The top three entries (iHeart, Meidas Media Network and NPR Sales Network) hold 66.9% between them. The gap is wide: iHeart's total is 3.7 times that of second-placed Meidas and 4.9 times that of NPR in third. Its mix is mostly audio, with 457,004,000 audio downloads and streams across 34,764 shows (86.4% of its total) and 72,085,000 video views and streams across 78 video shows.

Meidas and the video column

Meidas Media Network is the exception to the audio pattern. Its row lists 11,675,000 audio downloads and streams from 13 audio shows and 131,661,000 video views and streams from three video shows, against a listed total of 142,336,000. Video therefore makes up 92.5% of the total.

The row does not add up. The two components sum to 143,336,000, which is 1,000,000 above the listed total, and on that sum video would be 91.9% of the row. Six other rows differ from their component sums by 1,000, consistent with rounding to the nearest thousand; the Meidas gap is a thousand times larger. The documents contain no note explaining it.

The video figure is large by any comparison in the table. It is 1.83 times iHeart's 72,085,000, which comes from 78 video shows, and amounts to roughly 43.9 million per video show against roughly 0.92 million at iHeart. Meidas alone supplies 41.4% of the 318,159,000 video views and streams listed by the 13 entries that report any.

Which column decides the order? Re-ranking the 18 entries on audio downloads and streams alone, a PPC Land calculation, shifts several positions.

EntryRank on totalRank on audio only
Meidas Media Network211
Paramount610
The Volume1113
DailyWire+78
NPR Sales Network32
Libsyn53
Walt Disney Company85

Paramount's video views of 32,958,000 are 2.04 times its audio figure of 16,141,000, and video accounts for 67.1% of its total. At The Volume the share is 58.9%, at DailyWire+ 53.4% and at Sonoro Global Media Corp. 44.4%. iHeart's lead does not depend on video: its audio figure alone is 4.2 times the audio figure of NPR Sales Network, the next entry on that measure.

Clips and gaps

The clip columns follow a different logic from the episode columns. iHeart Audience Network leads on Instagram (1,103,650,000) and TikTok (842,848,000), while Paramount has the highest YouTube clip count at 261,904,000. Walt Disney Company lists 893,281,000 Instagram clip views against 3,065,000 video views and streams from three video shows, a ratio of about 291 to one. CNN shows 139,344,000 Instagram clip views against 7,601,000 audio downloads and streams in total. Podtrac defines the YouTube clip column as "Engaged view counts" of videos posted to the podcast's YouTube channel "that do not include full episodes."

Gaps are frequent. Seven of the 18 rows show "***" in the YouTube clips column, and five (NPR Sales Network, CNN, American Public Media, This American Life and ReVolver Podcasts) show it in the video views column. Podtrac's legend reads: "Indicates where data is not yet available." The documents do not say whether those entries have video content that is not yet reported or none at all.

YouTube's counting change and the video columns

From August 24, 2026, YouTube counts a view from the first frame across all formats, a change PPC Land reported on August 17. Views that pass the first frame or involve a click, the engaged views, are now available only through the YouTube Analytics and Reporting APIs.

Podtrac said on September 3 that its rankings use engaged views for YouTube podcasts, and published a sample of 84.2 million views from August 27 and 28. Engaged views came to 64% of views for episodes in playlists and 58% for other channel videos. The September global table is the first to cover a complete month after the switch.

The video definition in the global table names two sources only: YouTube and Spotify. That differs from the audio columns, which Podtrac describes as including app downloads, played downloads and Spotify streams "when available." The ranking also carries a disclaimer: "Rank is not from YouTube or any other service" and "Counts are not a measure of play duration." The supplied documents do not say whether August's table applied the same video definition, which leaves month-on-month video comparisons without a documented baseline.

Other yardsticks: Triton, IAB Tech Lab and Netflix

Podtrac is one of several measurement frameworks in use, and the others differ in unit and in who takes part. Triton Digital's separate ranker, published on September 17, put iHeart at 65,896,118 average weekly downloads within a 20-network table totalling 96,286,970, from which SiriusXM, NPR, Audacy and Wondery were absent. Weekly averages and Podtrac's monthly unique counts are not interchangeable.

On the standards side, IAB Tech Lab finalised version 2.3 of its podcast measurement guidelines on September 29, extending server-log counting to video delivered through open RSS feeds. A draft of the video rules had circulated since July 21. Episodes carried inside Netflix, which has taken video podcast shows from iHeartMedia, sit outside that open-feed arrangement and outside the guidelines.

Why the figures matter to the marketing community

The tables appear against a backdrop of growing spend. IAB and PwC put 2025 US podcast advertising at $2.9 billion, up 17.6%, and iHeartMedia reported podcast revenue of $162.1 million for the second quarter of 2026, up 20.7%. With spending at that scale, the construction of the rankings determines what their order can and cannot show.

Several features of the September edition stand out. The global total adds unlike units: server-measured audio downloads and platform-reported video views. A video view and a download are different events, and Podtrac says directly that counts do not measure play duration. Participation is uneven, with four US entries (iHeartPodcasts, Vox Media, Versant and Blaze Media) missing from the global table and three global entries (Meidas Media Network, Sonoro Global Media Corp. and American Public Media) missing from the US one. Competing yardsticks omit large names of their own, as Triton's table does, and Netflix distribution sits beyond the open-feed counting rules altogether.

The open items in this edition are narrow but specific: the 1,000,000 gap in the Meidas row, the DailyWire+ US figure above its worldwide figure, the unexplained rise of 6,143 active shows at the Audience Network, and the blank clip cells. Whether Podtrac will reconcile them in later releases is not stated in the documents.

On the question of whether video now decides who leads the tables, the September data gives a split answer. Video decides second place, since without it Meidas would fall to eleventh on audio alone. First place is decided by audio. The October edition will supply the next data point on whether that split persists.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Podtrac, the podcast measurement company, which publishes the rankings, and the 19 US and 18 global publishers and networks listed in them, led by iHeart Audience Network, with Meidas Media Network second on the global list.

What: Podtrac's September 2026 rankings of US and global multi-channel podcast publishers and networks. According to Podtrac, eight US participants were up on US downloads and eleven were up on unique monthly audience against August. The global table shows Meidas Media Network at 142,336,000, with 131,661,000 of that from video, and a 1,000,000 discrepancy in its row components.

When: Published on October 7, 2026, covering September 1 to 30, 2026, the first complete month after YouTube's view counting change of August 24, 2026.

Where: Podtrac's website and blog, covering US audiences in one table and worldwide audio and video consumption in the other.

Why: The rankings are the monthly reference tables Podtrac publishes for participating publishers. This edition draws attention because video views now sit inside the global total, YouTube's counting rules changed in late August, and competing measurement frameworks from Triton Digital and IAB Tech Lab use different units and different participants.