Sports and society and culture the theme of September's Australian Podcast Ranker

The September Triton Australian Podcast Ranker is out and unsurprising, given it was the month for NRL and AFL finals, SEN, ABC, LiSTNR (SCA) and independent sporting podcasts thrived.

On the other side of the coin society and culture podcasts also boomed with a particular mention of LiSTNR’s It’s a Lot with Abbie Chatfield (up 14 to 14) and Happy Hour with Lucy & Nikki (up 3 to 12). SCA’s Hit Network have given Lucy Jackson and Nikki Westcott an extra networked night on air and that is paying off across multiple platforms. There was also a debut at #64 for NOVA Entertainment‘s Just For Girls (pictured) which only debuted in late September and will be one to watch.

The Hamish and Andy Podcast is No 1 again, but overall monthly listeners and downloads have dropped over the last twelve months. Casefile True Crime, back up above ABC News Top Stories to #2 had more monthly downloads than H&A, but also had an additional new episode released last month.

The ABC’s top three podcasts, Top News Stories, Conversations (#7) and ABC News Daily (#11) between them had 5.5 million monthly downloads. Their SPORT Daily podcast was one of the few sporting ones to see a drop though, perhaps due to a large spike up in August from the Olympics.

The highest debut was a US podcast from Wondery, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard at #28. Dax’s podcast has been going since 2018 and made the switch to Wondery this year which will be one reason for the debut. The other is that his wife and often co-collaborator Kristen Bell is in the exceptional available on Netflix series Nobody Wants This at the moment, which people globally have watched more than 10 billion hours of so far, so I feel it has had a positive knock on affect for Dax too.

Outside of Just for Girls the other debuts into the top 100 were ABC AFL Daily and Sports Entertainment Network (SEN)’s Giddy Up with Gareth Hall.

Nova’s Smallzy’s Surgery was up 80 into the top 100 at #41, due to a visit to the MTV VMAs and some big name interviews on the red carpet.

ARN’s iHeart was again top publisher and LiSTNR top sales representative. Average weekly listenership was close to six million. That is a 15% year-on-year (YOY) increase.