Operating in an era of unprecedented political divisiveness, the podcast industry is delivering balance to an audio platform that was formerly owned, pre-Trump, by the conservative right.  Since last years Presidential election, more than 1,600 political podcasts have launched. You heard correctly…one-thousand, six hundred. And obviously, a majority of these shows have tried to counter-punch Trumps seismic move into the White House.

The leader of the pack, according to the podcast hosting company  RawVoice, is ‘Pod Save America’, hosted by three former Obama aides. The overwhelmingly successful podcast has nearly 120 million downloads to date.  And the success of PodSave America has brought balance to a sector that was previously dominated by conservative talk pundits.

What Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Jon Favreau have accomplished at lightening speed cannot be discounted.  As Jason Zengerle wrote in a recent New York Times article titled “The Voices In Blue America’s Head”:

With a shoestring budget and no organization backing, its hosts seem to have created something that liberals have spent almost two decades, and hundreds of millions of dollars, futilely searching for: the left’s answer to conservative talk radio.

Just as important to the podcast industry is the massive awareness and revenues that the show is capturing. The article quoted an anonymous executive at an ‘un-named’ podcasting company (psst- The New York Times is also a Podcast company — they need not look any further than the insights of their overwhelmingly popular podcast The Daily, to make internal revenue assumptions)…they said:

…assuming standard industry rates, Crooked Media is most likely bringing in at least $50,000 in advertising revenue for each episode of “PodSaveAmerica” – which at two episodes a week is about $5 million a year.

For shits and giggles, lets do a little math…

If, as reported, Pod Save America averages 1.5 million downloads per episode…and lets assume each show has a minimum of three advertisers per show…here’s how the math shapes out if sold at a $15 CPM:

$22,500 per spot x 3 spots = $67,500 per show x 2 shows per week = $135,000 per week

If the show delivers a 50 week schedule, that means revenues could conceivably be approaching $7 million annually!  Not too shabby! Let’s just say that’s hitting ‘pay-dirt’…in only 1 year!

Bottom line, the heated political discourse in this country shows no sign of abating. And that means one thing…that political podcasts will continue to be overwhelmingly popular….and that doesn’t hurt the podcast industry!

So why not explore for yourself some of the top political podcasts — simply by clicking on the below icon of each show, you can ONE-CLICK LISTEN for your enjoyment pleasure!

TOP POLITICAL PODCASTS