Edison Research at SSRS Announces Top 50 Podcasts in the U.S. for Q3 2026 from Edison Podcast Metrics™
Dumb Blonde Breaks Into the Top 20 for the First Time
Glen Mills, PA, USA, October 23, 2026 – Edison Research at SSRS announces the Top 50 Podcasts in the U.S. from Edison Podcast Metrics™ based on reach for the third quarter of 2026 among weekly podcast consumers ages 13+.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Crime Junkie, and The Daily top the list, as they did in Q2 2026. Other rank changes in the Top 10 noted below parenthetically. The full list of Top 50 podcasts is below.
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- Crime Junkie
- The Daily
- Call Her Daddy
- Smartless
- New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce (+1 rank position since Q2 2026)
- This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von (+1 rank position since Q2 2026)
- Dateline NBC (-2 rank positions since Q2 2026)
- Rotten Mango (+4 rank position since Q2 2026)
- The Breakfast Club (+1 rank position since Q2 2026)
Breaking into the Top 20
Dumb Blonde breaks into the top 20 for the first time. Host Bunnie Xo made news in August after posting and removing an episode about her divorce from music artist Jelly Roll.
Welcome to the Top 25
The Pat McAfee Show debuts in the top 25. The sports podcaster released a highly criticized country rock album in August, shortly before the start of the 2026 NFL season.
Another sports podcast, Pardon My Take, breaks into the top 25. The show’s creators published a book to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the podcast, appropriately titled: Pardon My Book.
Kill Tony breaks into the top 25. The show returned to Madison Square Garden in New York with back-to-back nightly specials.
Joining the Top 50
Startalk Radio, Club 520, The Stephen A. Smith Show/Straight Shooter, Hang Out with Sean Hannity, and Smosh Reads Reddit Stories all enter the top 50 for the first time.
Bubbling under: True Crime with Kendall Rae climbs 44 positions to 55th, just missing the top 50.
The podcast show ranker is derived from data collected continuously during the third quarter of 2026, interviewing 5,223 weekly podcast consumers ages 13 and older in the U.S. Participants indicate which podcasts they listened to or watched in the past week along with a variety of demographic, psychographic, and purchase-behavior information. This ranker measures reach as a percentage of the weekly podcast audience.
For more information on how to become a subscriber to the full datasets, please contact info@ssrs.com.
Edison Research at SSRS is the leading audio market research practice in the world. Through survey research and innovative measurement approaches, we provide landmark data and insights on consumer behavior and emerging trends in the U.S. and more than 66 countries worldwide. Our world-renowned studies include Share of Ear®, the only single-source measure of all audio consumption in the U.S.; Edison Podcast Metrics™, the only survey-based measure of podcast listening in the U.S.; and The Infinite Dial®, the survey of record for media and technology trends since 1998.
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