SEPTEMBER 2024: TUNING IN TO THE CANADIAN PODCAST ECOSYSTEM

In September, a US indictment publicly unveiled a Russian campaign to fund US and Canadian online political influencers, many of whom produce popular podcasts. We use this month’s snapshot to investigate the role of political and news podcasts in the Canadian information ecosystem. Specifically, we ask: how has the landscape of the Canadian podcast ecosystem changed over time? Which Canadians listen to podcasts? And do Canadians pay more attention to Canadian or out-of-country podcasts?

Figure 1 shows the growth in Canadian news and politics podcasts since January 2023. We observe a sharp rise in frequency of podcast episodes from March 2024 onwards. As compared to the first week in January 2023 which saw 34 news and politics podcasts released, the week of July 7, 2024 saw a high of 214 podcast episodes released. 

We observe interesting variations looking at gender, language, age, and political interest (see Figure 2). Men tend to listen to more podcasts in general more than women, particularly political podcasts. The younger population (18-34) are the most frequent listeners of podcasts, where almost one quarter of individuals under the age of 34 report regular podcast usage and slightly under a quarter report listening to political podcasts. This younger population consumes more than double the senior population (55+). Those who are politically interested are also far more likely to listen to both political and non-political podcasts, with very low podcast uptake in respondents that report low interest in politics. English-speakers also tend to listen to more podcasts than French-speakers. 

We also examined the top podcasts consumed by Canadians across podcast platforms. We find that the majority of podcasts listened to in Canada are from the US (71% with 12% being international). Less than 20% of the top podcasts are Canadian.  This finding is consistent for political podcasts, where only 4 among the top 20 political podcasts listened to in Canada are Canadian (20%). 

Overall, political podcasts are an important and growing part of the Canadian information ecosystem. Listeners tend to be among the most politically interested Canadians, although Canadians generally strongly prefer American to Canadian content.

Important note for this month: 

This month’s Situation Report does not include data from Facebook due to Meta’s decision to shut down Crowdtangle, a research tool for monitoring the platform. All measures using social media data reflect month-to-month changes with all Facebook data excluded.

Key findings:

• TikTok increasingly dominates news engagement. 

• Elected officials lose trust. 

• Podcasts playing an increasingly important role in Canada, particularly for the politically interested.

• CBC surges in popularity, BlogTO enters the Top 5 and appetite for local news increases.