More Women Listen to Kids & Family Podcasts than True Crime

For years, we’ve been told that women are obsessed with true crime podcasts above all. But it’s not true. Data shows that there’s one category of podcast that’s more popular for women: Kids and Family.

According to a 2021 report from Nielsen:

• 79% of women listen to Kids & Family podcasts
• 63% of women listen to True Crime podcasts

That’s a significant margin, especially when you factor in that the third most popular category for women, Arts, is only 2% less popular than True Crime. Kids & Family is a full 16% more popular than True Crime.

Kids & Family consists of two disparate types of podcasts that both hold obvious appeal to women. There’s parenting podcasts, and podcasts for kids. Lumping these two together — as almost all platforms do — is unfortunate because there is a vast difference in the actual audiences for these two genres of podcasts.

It is impossible to know how much of Nielsen’s 79% of women’s listenership goes to parenting podcasts versus podcasts for kids. But 6 out of the current top 10 podcasts in the Kids & Family category are targeted at kids.

We can assume that women are listening to parenting podcasts on their own, and engaging in typical listener behavior. But kids’ podcasts are much more complex. They contain a hidden audience: Kids. Data is not collected on listeners under the age of 12, for privacy reasons. That means that women’s listenership to kids’ podcasts actually covers their kids’ listenership. And it means that the audience for kids’ podcasts is likely even larger than represented in national surveys.

Kids Listen is one of the few organizations that has done research on listener behavior for kids’ podcasts. (Full disclosure: I co-founded Kids Listen and help with research efforts.) We’ve found that one of the most important differences in behavior between adult and kids’ podcasts is that listening is a shared experience, with multiple listeners. Mothers or female guardians are the most likely to listen along with their kid (67%), followed by siblings (51%), and then fathers (42%). Only 27% responded that the child listens alone. This means that one “listen” for a kids’ podcast is equivalent, on average, to more than one listener.

Add to that another unique listening behavior: 80% of kids listen to the same episode more than once, with 20% of that group listening 10 or more times. This absolutely tracks with how kids consume other types of media. Ask any parent who can read a book without looking at the pages, or attempts to put a limit on weekly viewings of Encanto.

So why, with all of this information, do we still treat Kids & Family like any other podcast category? Why does True Crime get so much more coverage than the truly fascinating trends we’re seeing in kids’ podcasts? When will we finally recognize the power of shared listening experiences and repeat listens?

After many years, the industry has begun to take notice. But kids’ podcasts are still at the beginning stages in terms of investment and awareness within the larger podcast ecosystem. An important step is to recognize that “women” in the Kids & Family category is more than women — and understand what that entails.

*Thanks to Sounds Profitable for bringing this statistic to my attention in their fascinating report on women podcast listeners on 3/15/22.