Armchair Expert left January’s Golden Globes ceremony at the Beverly Hilton among the nominees who lost. On Spotify, actor Dax Shepard’s interview podcast still ranks among the most listened to in the US, while in the ranking by research firm Edison Research, which counts viewing alongside listening, it sits outside the top 50. In the first quarter of 2026, when it was a Golden Globes finalist, it climbed twelve places to 38th. In the third quarter it was 59th, according to a figure Edison gave to Bloomberg.
The show now outside the top 50 is one that, according to Bloomberg, made Edison’s top 50 every quarter from 2022 to the end of last year. Last year it ranked between 36th and 50th. It was already missing from the chart for this year’s second quarter.
How Edison measures the most-listened-to podcasts in the US
Edison builds its ranking of the most-listened-to podcasts in the US for the third quarter of 2026 from 5,223 online interviews with Americans aged 13 and over who listen to or watch podcasts every week. The interviews run continuously throughout the quarter, in English and Spanish. Edison ranks shows by reach, meaning their share of the weekly podcast audience. In the interviews, respondents themselves report which shows they listened to or watched in the past week.
A Czech study by the research agency Median for public broadcaster Czech Radio (Český rozhlas) from April 2025 also counts watching as podcast listening, explicitly including playing podcasts on YouTube. YouTube came out as the most used platform for playing and discovering podcasts in Czechia, especially among listeners up to the age of twenty-four. Spotify came second and was gaining ground among younger listeners.
On 26 October this year the show was twelfth in Spotify’s US podcast chart. Spotify is the app the show’s listeners use most often for podcasts, Edison’s director of research Gabriel Soto told Bloomberg. In his view, this probably stems from Shepard’s earlier exclusive deal with Spotify.
The Spotify exclusivity ended before Armchair Expert released its first video episode. Video arrived only with a July 2024 deal in which Amazon’s Wondery won exclusive rights to distribute the show and sell its advertising. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal was worth about eighty million dollars.
With the deal, the show moved under Amazon, which split up Wondery in August 2025. Armchair Expert went to a new Creator Services team for creator-led, video-focused shows. The European side of the same turn to video is described in our report from The Podcast Show in London.
“Shows with a stronger YouTube presence are rising over titles that have built an audience on legacy podcast players,” Soto told Bloomberg. Yet according to Bloomberg, the show’s episodes on YouTube generally get far under fifty thousand views, but the interview with James McAvoy drew 198 thousand on the Armchair Expert channel in less than two weeks.
Fans fault Shepard for repeating his stories
Fans on Reddit also fault the episodes themselves for repeating Shepard’s stories. “At this point, I’ve heard the Dax story over and over again,” wrote one of the commenters whose posts Bloomberg selected. The author of the newsletter For Your Viewing, who had listened to the show since it began in 2018, described on Substack as early as March 2025 how, after the Wondery deal, she moved Armchair Expert to the bottom of her list in the Pocket Casts app.
Meanwhile another celebrity interview show, SmartLess, holds fifth place on Edison’s third-quarter list. Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman concludes from the decline that shows may have to change their established routine to hold their audience’s attention, for example with timely topics, rare guests or co-hosts. In her view, Armchair Expert could return to the ranking. Good Hang, for which Amy Poehler accepted the Golden Globe in January from Snoop Dogg, launched only in March 2025 and is eighteenth in the same ranking.
The Golden Globes have the data firm Luminate compile the list of podcasts eligible to compete for the award. For the 84th edition, they published thirty of them on 5 October this year. For the January ceremony, Armchair Expert was among the twenty-five eligible shows. The show that left the Beverly Hilton among the nominees in January is missing from the list of podcasts eligible for the next Golden Globes.
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