Since the election, I’ve wondered whether Kamala Harris’s decision to take a pass on Joe Rogan’s #1-rated podcast may have cost her the Presidency. Her communications consigliere Stephanie Cutter later explained the ill-fated decision to Crooked Media’s “Pod Save America” podcast:
Yet, VP Harris did find time to trek to New York to appear on a half-century-old linear TV show that averaged 5.4 million viewers through 2024, most of whom already were in VP Harris’s court. Her appearance that evening drew 6.6 million, 40% less than Rogan’s.
By contrast, Trump’s stultified appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience drew an audience of about 50 million and, more significantly, a pivotal Presidential endorsement from Rogan himself on the eve of the election. Ouch.
Unlike other communications counselors, I don’t relish the role of Monday morning quarterback, especially over the Democrats’ failed messaging and media strategy.
To her credit, the Vice President did join the #2-rated podcast “Call Her Daddy,” with an audience of one million, only to have that show’s host, Alex Cooper, diss the campaign to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit. The Harris PR team also pitched the Veep to “The Hot Ones,” the popular chicken-wing-eating show on YouTube, but they were turned down.
In either case, all this election conjecture is now moot given the world’s richest man’s infusion of $277 million to Trump and the GOP, further drowning the American electorate in a sea of disinformation. Relatedly, Semafor reports that the king of disinformation himself, Rupert Murdoch, is now shopping for like-minded podcasts.
Again, I digress.
In her Nieman Media Lab piece, “Podcasting becomes the primary strategy, not an afterthought,” Joni Deutsch writes:
At a time where traditional media trust continues to hit historic lows, podcasts can help long-standing organizations establish stronger relationships with audiences and, in the process, drive real change in how people think and engage with the news.
I thus want to use this space to explore where podcasts should reside in the PR pro’s “earned media” toolbox and share some useful resources for identifying the most appropriate pods for your company or client — of the millions now in production.
To this end, I surveyed the founders of four ascendant companies that offer searchable databases of podcasts. They include Anuj Agarwal, founder of MillionPodcasts, Greg Galant, co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, Bradley Davis, founder and CEO of Podchaser, and James Potter, founder of Rephonic. First this chart:
Here is what they told me:
Q: Briefly describe your service and what makes it special:
MillionPodcasts is the ultimate solution for PR professionals, marketers, and outreach managers looking to connect with the right podcast hosts and producers. Our extensive and continuously updated database includes verified email contacts, social media profiles, and detailed podcast information across all niches and hosting platforms.
Q: What makes you special?
Dedicated Research Team: Ensures accurate, up-to-date contact details of hosts and producers.
- Advanced Filters: Allow tailored searches by popularity, activeness, location, duration, and more.
- AI-Powered Categorization: Simplifies discovering podcasts by niche or interest.
- Effortless Export: Generate CRM-friendly custom lists in CSV or Excel formats.
Q: Where are you headquartered and when were you founded?
MillionPodcasts is headquartered in Newark, Delaware, USA, and was founded in 2024.
Q: How would you quantify/describe your subscribers/users?
Our subscribers include PR professionals of all sizes, marketing teams (from small to large-scale operations), researchers, founders, and executives working in the podcast industry.
Q: What am I missing?
We have an in-house research team that goes beyond RSS feed emails, finding personal emails of hosts and producers to ensure comprehensive contact information.
Q: Briefly describe your service and what makes it special:
Muck Rack is AI-powered PR software built for how you work. What makes us special is that we’ve purposely built our AI-powered comprehensive and integrated platform from the ground up with public relations and communications professionals in mind to streamline the PR workflow to get you the right results, faster and more efficiently. We grow businesses by helping them generate positive media coverage, monitor mentions
to manage brand reputation and analyze the impact of PR on business outcomes.
Q: Where are you headquartered and when were you founded?
Muck Rack was founded in 2009 to connect journalists on social media. In 2011, the Muck Rack software platform was born, offering journalist profiles and a media database that gained a reputation for being the most accurate in the industry. We’re headquartered in the cloud! Muck Rack has been a remote-first company since our founding and became fully distributed in 2021. This means no offices and no physical headquarters.
Q: How would you quantify/describe your subscribers/users?
Muck Rack has two user groups: Our customers are primarily communications and PR professionals, with about 6,000 companies using our platform to generate earned media and analyze and report on their coverage. Founded as a journalist tool, we also have tens of thousands of journalists using Muck Rack’s free tools to showcase their work with online portfolios, analyze news about any topic, and measure the impact of their stories.
Our podcast database offers a variety of filters, including geography, languages, and domain authority, and users can search by a specific podcast name or keyword.
Q: What am I missing?
This question: What should PR pros consider when it comes to podcasts and incorporating them into their strategies?
The recent election results have sparked an awakening among corporate executives to rethink their approach to media relations, with an emphasis on nontraditional platforms like podcasts. But this shift is hardly news to PR pros. PR teams have been focusing on targeting niche outlets and audiences for years. At Muck Rack, our customers have been pitching podcasts since we introduced them to our media database in 2020 and have added 153,117 podcasters and 885 podcasts to their media lists just last month alone. The key here is that CEOs and business leaders are finally catching up to the value of niche targeting, which their PR teams have been trying to convince them of for years. Getting in front of the right, albeit sometimes smaller, audience means shifting KPIs from large-scale (impressions) to smaller-scale (engagement).
Q: Briefly describe your service and what makes it special:
Podchaser is the intelligence engine for the podcast industry, complete with 5.5M podcasts, podcast reach, audience insights, and 2M+ validated contacts
Q: Where are you headquartered and when were you founded?
Podchaser was founded in 2016 by a group of like-minded podcast enthusiasts who met via a humble Reddit thread. With the optimistic goal of creating the ultimate platform-agnostic podcast database, the small team worked to build a company from the ground up. The company has been fully remote and distributed since its founding. Podchaser was acquired by Acast in 2022.
Q: How would you quantify/describe your subscribers/users?
Hundreds of PR agencies, many dozen brands, and media organizations use Podchaser Pro. The majority of Pro users leverage podcast data for earned media, including guest booking and media monitoring. A growing number use Podchaser for podcast advertising use cases. The media orgs use Pro for research and insights, including competitive intel.
Q: What am I missing?
As traditional media continues to fracture and decentralize, the importance of podcasts has never been greater. We frequently hear from clients how Podchaser breathes new life into their businesses in the face of shrinking newsrooms and media contraction.
Q: Briefly describe your service and what makes it special:
Founded in 2020, “Rephonic is an all-in-one podcast outreach and research tool that gives access to detailed listener demographics and contact information for over three million podcasts. It simplifies the process of discovering relevant shows, pitching them at scale, and managing outreach campaigns with real-time data, saving users hours of manual work.”
Q: How would you quantify/describe your subscribers/users?
PR professionals, marketing agencies, individuals pitching themselves, businesses seeking sponsorship opportunities, and podcasters looking to cross-promote their shows. They range from solo entrepreneurs to teams at major brands.
Rephonic also has:
- Lots of advanced search filters (e.g. show me podcasts likely listened to by mechanics)
- Ability to create and collaborate on target lists with your team
- A concierge service to find better contacts
- Full-text episode transcripts
Q: What am I missing?
Rephonic also has:
- Lots of advanced search filters (e.g. show me podcasts likely listened to by mechanics)
- Ability to create and collaborate on target lists with your team
- A concierge service to find better contacts
- Full-text episode transcripts
I‘ll leave you with this observation from Matthew Belloni of Puck in his piece on entertainment PR agency PMK’s defections and the lawsuit they spurred:
You don’t need me to tell you that talent P.R. is a much different job today than it was even 10 years ago. Now, a well-timed Deuxmoi post can be far more effective than an EW cover. Chicken Shop Date is the new Tonight Show.
Still, there’s nothing like a prominent Wall Street Journal or New York Times feature, let alone a six-minute segment on NBC “Today” or PBS “NewsHour.\” Do these traditional news organizations move the needle to the same degree as an influential social media star, top-rated podcast, or heavily subscribed newsletter? It’s an important question for these times and our industry.
If you can’t spring for one of the above services, here is a (free) list of:
The Top 50 Podcasts in the U.S. on Spotify for 2024. But, oops, Kylie (Mrs. Jason) Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie” podcast just leaped ahead of Joe Rogan’s to take the top spot.
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- Call Her Daddy
- This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
- Crime Junkie
- The Daily (New York Times)
- The Tucker Carlson Show
- Huberman Lab
- Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
- Smosh Reads Reddit Stories
- Shawn Ryan Show
- Up First from NPR
- Serial Killers
- The Journal* (Wall Street Journal)
- SmartLess
- Lex Fridman Podcast*
- The Mel Robbins Podcast
- Morbid
- Rotten Mango
- New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
- What Now? with Trevor Noah*
- Bad Friends
- Stuff You Should Know
- Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain*
- Dateline NBC
- Conspiracy Theories*
- Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast
- NPR News Now
- Kill Tony
- 2 Bears, 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer
- Hot Mess with Alix Earle*
- Malevolent Mischief: True Stories of Horror
- Distractible*
- Science Vs*
- On Purpose with Jay Shetty
- The Ben Shapiro Show*
- MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
- Pod Save America
- The Viall Files
- 20/20
- PBD Podcast*
- Today, Explained
- The Comment Section with Drew Afualo*
- Cancelled with Tana Mongeau & Brooke Schofield
- Rotten Mango Video*
- The LOL Podcast*
- Modern Wisdom*
- Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend
- The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett
- Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh
- Murder in America
Peter Himler is founding principal of Flatiron Communications, a NYC-based PR and digital media consultancy. Follow him on BlueSky and/or Threads.