![]() Serial spawned a Saturday Night Live skit, a bestselling book and four-part HBO documentary series, and a wave of true crime podcasts that still hasn’t abated. Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” told me his show took four years to reach one million listeners. That is as many people as watch an episode of “Louie,” the buzzed-about comedy on FX. “Serial” has been downloaded or streamed on iTunes more than five million times - at a cost of nothing - and averages over 1.5 million listeners an episode. ![]() To call something the most popular podcast might seem a little like identifying the tallest leprechaun, but the numbers are impressive for any media platform. On November 23, 2014, David Carr wrote in The New York Times: Serial topped the iTunes charts even before its launch. “I’m not sure - it will certainly be much smaller.” “It will be interesting, once we start podcasting more, if the audience feels different than the audience we have for This American Life right now,” executive producer Julie Snyder told us back then. They also expected the audience for Serial to be small. “We can tell it as long as we need to tell it, and we don’t have to worry about it.” “For us, that it’s a podcast is so liberating,” Koenig told Nieman Lab at the time. And some of those downloads, I should add, come from Kim Kardashian.October 3, 2014Serial launched as a spinoff of This American Life, and its first episode aired in that show’s radio slot. Today, the combined downloads for the first two seasons have topped 350 million. In the meantime, here’s another neat data point for context: When the very first episode of Serial debuted on October 3, 2014, it was downloaded only 86,000 times on its first day. We’ll have to wait until the end of the season, and then dig through the data, to figure out how Serial measures up. (Snyder was also the executive producer.) S-Town released all seven of its episodes at once, and they went on to collectively bring in over 40 million global downloads within the first month - a high-water mark for the podcast industry at the time. The performance of Serial’s third season can’t yet be compared to that of S-Town, its acclaimed novelistic spinoff by Brian Reed that was released in March 2017. The world is crazy now and there are so many podcasts and there’s such wonderful journalism being produced … it’s heartening that people are excited for us to keep going.” Because we really believe these stories are important. “So these launch numbers - and the response to the episodes in just the first few days - have been so gratifying. So to come out this season and say, Instead we’re gonna do a bunch of stories from Cleveland! Well … we were admittedly a bit nervous before the release,” Snyder said. That we’re supposed to be true-crime, or just one deep investigative story, or some other easy descriptor. “One of the things that’s stressed me out about Serial the last few years has been audience expectation. The huge numbers are great news for Serial, says co-creator and executive producer Julie Snyder, especially because the third season is so different than the first and second. Its second episode, published a week later, dropped down to 1.24 million unique first-day downloads. The debut episode of that sophomore season garnered around 1.34 million unique downloads on its first day. That’s higher than the launch numbers for Serial’s second season, which debuted in December 2015 and focused on the mysterious kidnapping of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. ![]() The second episode, “You’ve Got Some Gauls,” brought in around 1.43 million unique first-day downloads. The first episode, “A Bar Fight Walks Into the Justice Center,” saw around 1.46 million unique first-day downloads, according to Podtrac numbers provided to Vulture. When Serial returned with its highly anticipated third season last Thursday, dropping two episodes to kick off an ambitious journey into the heart of Cleveland’s criminal-justice system, the podcast scored its biggest debut yet: More than 1.4 million people downloaded each of the first two episodes within the first 14 hours of publication, according to the podcast measurement firm Podtrac. Photo: Moth Studio and Adam Maida/Courtesy of SERIAL ![]()
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