The Serial Factor: Podcast Listeners Are Still Obsessed With True Crime

Podcasts have been around for a couple of decades, but they didn't really go mainstream until 2014, when Serial put them on the map. As of this writing, over 3 million podcasts have been launched, according to the Listen Notes podcast search engine. (Go ahead, create your own.)

Do you share your taste in podcasts with the rest of America? Pew Research Center did a deep dive into the top-ranked podcasts in the US to find out which topics pop. It quantifies only 451 of them; the list is based on the top 300 podcasts in daily charts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Unsurprisingly, the topic that dominates podcasts is true crime: Almost a quarter of podcasts make murder and mayhem their primary focus. (It's even become a cliché; a streaming show called Based on a True Story is about podcasters working with a serial killer.) The second most covered topic is politics and government, at 10%.

About 20% of podcasts feature more than one topic, while 12% don't fit any major category. Pew cites, for example, one popular podcast that's just groups of people playing D&D.

Fifteen percent of podcasts have a news focus, usually on politics or sports. Also of note is the number of podcasts that are affiliated with a news organization—18%—with another 51% affiliated with some other kind of organization. Only 31% are truly independent.

Half of the news-focused podcasts are commentary on what's happening IRL; 22% go for Serial-style deep reporting and analysis or for interviews.

Podcasts are far from being audio-only. Pew checked in with each title to see whether it has a web presence beyond the download, and 73% do. What's more, slightly more than half have released videos related to the podcast.

Across all the topics, Pew found that formats vary: 38% do deep reporting on topics, 16% are commentary, and 23% prefer interviews. The majority (58%) have a single host. The average length of a top-ranked podcast is 50 minutes. Finally, almost half turn to listeners for financial contributions. (In separate research from earlier this year, Pew found that 13% of listeners have paid for a podcast subscription.)

For more details, read the full report at Pew Research Center.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

Read the latest from Eric Griffith

Read full bio