The political talk and news podcast genres are some of the largest formats in the space. But the political affiliation split among those listeners may surprise you.
According to data collected by Sounds Profitable, there’s an almost perfect split among those who are monthly consumers of political talk and news podcast episodes.
36% of political talk listeners identify as conservatives, while 34% are liberal, and 29% are moderates.
Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster noted that the data flies in the face of the perception of the genre as a whole.
“For all the hand-wringing about echo chambers and the assumption that political podcast audiences are just people yelling into ideologically sorted voids, the actual data suggests something far more mundane: people across the political spectrum are interested in political content,” said Webster.
The split along political affiliation lines is similar in straight news podcast listening, as well. 32% of monthly news podcasts identify as liberal. That exact same figure — 32% — label themselves as conservatives, while 34% say they are moderates.
“If you were designing a genre from scratch to perfectly mirror the podcast audience, you couldn’t do much better than News,” Webster concluded.
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