How to See How Many Listeners a Podcast Has (and Other Stats)

If you're researching a particular podcast, or planning to pitch yourself as a guest, you probably want to know how many people are listening to it.

Perhaps you want to boost your revenue by sponsoring podcasts in your niche? Or maybe you host your own show, and you're dying to know how similar shows are performing.

Surely finding that info will be a piece of cake? Well, it is if you use Rephonic. The trouble is that only the podcast publisher knows their actual number of listeners, subscribers and downloads.

We’ve laid out a few ways to look up valuable podcast stats and figure out how popular a show is.

🎧 Six ways to see how many listeners a podcast has

1. Get podcast listener numbers using Rephonic

The easiest way to tell how many listeners a podcast has is with Rephonic. We have comprehensive podcast statistics for all 2.5m shows on our database, including listener estimates.

We collect hundreds of publicly available data points for each podcast to come up with our metrics. Of course, it is a "best guess," so if you're determined to know the actual listener numbers, you'll have to contact the podcast publisher or host directly.

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2. Check ratings and reviews

When sizing up a podcast, many people often turn to platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, two of the leading podcast players, particularly in the US and the UK. They aggregate the most listener feedback, allowing users to check the average rating, number of ratings, and even read reviews on Apple Podcasts.

You could try to guess that a podcast has a large audience by the total number of ratings it has. But this is a somewhat flawed approach because there's not always direct link between the volume of listener feedback and audience size.

Also, to get a full picture of its audience, you'll have to check each of the podcast apps where you can listen to the show. The best ones to check are Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Castbox, Podcast Addict, Podchaser and Amazon/Audible.

Do many stars do fans give, and what are the reviews like? Enthusiastic? Excited? Are their superfans raving, or are the comments short and boring or even non-existent?

Rephonic collects all of this listener feedback and makes it available for free. Here's an example for The Daily (scroll down to "Reviews").

3. Inspect chart rankings

Similarly to ratings and reviews, Apple Podcasts and Spotify are the best places to look for the most comprehensive podcast chart rankings. If a show is ranking high in its category — or perhaps across all categories — then that's a pretty good indication that they have a sizeable audience.

The charts are not an ideal measure of popularity, though. It's thought that they are calculated by looking at the number of new followers (previously 'subscribers') each podcast has added over a recent time window.

If a show's listeners skew towards another platform, or another country where Apple or Spotify is less dominant, then they won't perform so well in the charts.

Rephonic collects these Apple and Spotify chart rankings and makes them available for free. Here's an example for The Daily (scroll down to "Charts" - if it's missing then that show is not ranking at all).

Google Podcasts maintain their own charts too, but these are less comprehensive.

4. Investigate podcast stats revealed by some apps

There's no official way to see a podcast's global number of listeners across every app, but a few of the smaller podcast apps have data about their own users.

For example if you go to the Castbox listing for The Daily you can see how many Castbox users have subscribed to that show and how many times its episodes have been streamed on their app. Note that Castbox represents roughly 2% of podcast listeners.

Although not ideal, these numbers give you a clue as to the size of a show's audience. One way to use them is by comparing the stats between shows on the same platform.

Other apps to check for this kind of podcast data are Podcast Addict and TuneIn.

Apps such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts have no way for the public to see how many listeners or streams a show has. Only the podcast host or publisher has access to these stats.

5. Check social media presence

Checking a podcast's social media accounts can tell you something about their listenership figures and how engaged their listeners are.

Usually you can go to the podcast's official website (often listed in podcast listening apps) to find links to their social accounts.

Check out their Instagram feed or X account. Are they active on TikTok? How many followers do the hosts have? Can you see a lot of positive listener engagement on these accounts?

See total YouTube podcast views with Rephonic

If you're looking for the number of podcast views, you can do a quick search on YouTube and scroll through their videos to get an idea of how many views each episode has. You can see the total number of YouTube views for each podcast on Rephonic's database.

A lot of people watch podcasts on YouTube now, so knowing a podcast's viewership numbers can help you get a better understanding of its total reach.

6. Ask the publisher directly

To find out the most accurate podcast numbers, you need to go direct to the source. That means reaching out to the host, owner or publisher. It can be challenging to find podcast email addresses, which is why we've written a guide to help you out.

Once you've sent your email, there's no guarantee that they'll respond. But the likelihood depends on your intent. If you're looking to spend money on sponsoring their show then you may get a quick reply! On the other hand, if you're looking to research your competitors before you launch your own podcast, you’re probably not going to be so lucky.

Watch out for publishers giving you their all-time number of downloads, i.e. the number of times all combined episodes have been downloaded since the podcast was founded. It may sound impressive, but it doesn't tell you a lot about how many listeners they're currently pulling in per episode.

🎙️ Is it possible to check how many downloads a podcast has?

Finding podcast download numbers is a common approach you might use to make decisions about which shows to reach out to.

Unfortunately, these numbers are somewhat misunderstood in the world of podcasting.

Only the podcasters have access to their download stats. As a listener, you can’t conveniently locate them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or any other podcast listening platform.

But even the podcasters find it tricky to know their numbers because podcasts are a decentralized medium. Put simply, that means that people can download and listen to a podcast on a range of devices from mobiles to laptops and even smart speakers. They can also listen to episodes on a whole range of apps and platforms.

Listeners can choose to subscribe and automatically download every episode, or download it on the go, which is known as user-initiated episodes. However, download numbers don’t tell you when they listened to the episode or if they even listened at all.

That's why Rephonic gives you listener per episode numbers instead of downloads, to provide a more accurate idea of the size of an individual podcast’s audience.

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📈 Is it possible to see how many subscribers a podcast has?

Podcast subscriber numbers are often used as a guide to understanding how popular a podcast is.

However, finding the podcast subscriber count is notoriously difficult, for the same reason that it’s difficult to find the number of listeners and downloads. Podcast distribution is decentralized - in other words, there are many different places you can listen to episodes and subscribe to shows.

This is how podcasts become available:

And therein lies the problem when it comes to finding out podcast subscriber numbers.

There are piles of platforms out there. Spotify, Apple podcasts, and iHeartRadio are three of the largest, but there are many smaller players too.

Buzzsprout lists at least 39 different podcast apps in its Definitive Podcast Directory List for 2022.

All that makes it almost impossible to see how many subscribers a podcast has. Also, those numbers also don't tell you how many people actually listen versus the numbers who subscribe but never get around to it.

Instead, you can see the estimated podcast listener numbers by podcast on Rephonic's database.

Discover how popular a podcast is with Rephonic

The easiest way to look up podcast stats is with Rephonic. For any podcast, see how many listeners it has, its chart rankings, social followers, YouTube viewership, reviews and more so you don’t have to waste valuable time searching the web.

If you're looking for podcasts to pitch as a potential guest or sponsor, Rephonic is a great way to find the right shows in any niche and quickly find the best email address to contact them with.

Get started with a free trial today.