This just in: News bulletins are the latest podcast trend
The humble news bulletin — a staple of live radio that pre-dates TV — has become the latest podcast listening trend, as short bite-sized blasts from Sky News, the ABC, SBS, and The Squiz flood the upper reaches of July’s Podcast Ranker.
ABC News Top Stories is the second most-listened-to Australian podcast in the country, according to Triton’s podcast ranker.
Each episode runs for around two minutes, and there are roughly 12 published each day. Between them, they pull an audience of 837,869 listeners, although when you look at the download numbers (3.3m), it averages out to around 8,700 downloads each episode.
Sky News Australia Updates crashed into #5 on the chart for July, with 94 three-to-four-minute episodes pulling 797,917 downloads (8,488 each episode) – with 446,257 listeners across the month.
Independent publishing houses are also trading in the bulletin. The Squiz Today sits at #10 with its daily 12-ish minute news show pulling 368,665 monthly listeners, while #16 The Daily Aus alternates between four minute and 12 minute episodes, drawing 286,147 listeners across July. (Although just this morning, The Daily Aus dropped a 17-minute episode on Trump’s negotiations with Ukraine and Russia, so perhaps they are pushing the limits.)
News bulletins are the latest podcast trend.
7am, recently sold to Solstice Media by Schwartz Media, publishes a daily 15-minute news package with 243,812 monthly listeners, while Mamamia’s The Quicky (“The easiest and most enjoyable way to get across the news each day”) gets a monthly audience of 219,705 to its 15-minute news episodes.
Nine News (#36) offers a six-minute news snack multiple times a day, while Nova’s The Update (#23) cycles between three minute updates and 17-minute shows. 7News Headlines (#49) wraps the days news into a four-minute nightly bulletin, before stretching out in the morning with a 17 minute epic.
SBS News Update (#60), at six to seven minutes each show, is often more in-depth than SBS News In Depth (#48), which runs for four-to-five minutes apiece.
Even Commonwealth Bank is getting in on the trend, with its ten-minute CommSec Market Updates, through Listnr, drawing 146,345 listeners in July.
Interestingly, this trend was highlighted in the Podpoll 25 report, issued on Tuesday morning by production house Deadset Studios, which showed that Aussies were increasingly listening to podcasts with a run time of less than 15 minutes.
Considering the overall internet trend towards shorter content — Tiktok videos, tweets, news stories led with bullet-point summaries, pop songs rather than psychedelic double-albums — it will be interesting to see if more podcasts follow the successful ABC News Top Stories model.
Two minute episodes, every two hours, second-place on the podium? Perhaps we need a different leaderboard for downloads per episode.
View the entire Podcast Ranker here.
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