The 2018 Big List of Listicles

Happy List-cember! We all know that the end of the year brings about lists of everything imaginable — best photos of the year, best songs of the year, best YouTube videos, best human stunts, and of course, best podcasts of the year. These lists have seemingly quadrupled over the past few years. Every online source seems to be giving their take on the best audio of the year. There’s no one body that can definitively say they’ve identified the BEST of the best, so we’ve set out to compile all those lists. The goal of this list of lists is to identify some trends, namely: which podcasts were named the most, which networks are producing extremely popular shows, how does this list of list compare to last year’s, and more! Also on the brain as I went through these (many, many) lists: which source of best-of’s do we trust and why?

A few things to note: these links comes from the U.S., the U.K, and Australia. Several of the articles contain writing and recommendations by people outside of these countries.

Let me know if I’ve missed your list of 2018 bests by emailing earbudspodcastcollective@gmail.com.

To note: online sources have been compiling lists of podcasts to listen to all year long, so, for the purposes of this list of lists, we are focusing on articles that were published from the second half of the year and on…

Here ya go…

1. The 16 Best Podcasts of 2018 – Discover Pods
2. The 10 Best Podcasts of 2018 – Vulture
3. The Best Podcasts of 2018 – The New Yorker
4. 10 Best Podcasts of 2018 – Harper’s Bazaar
5. The Best Podcasts of 2018 – Digital Trends
6. 100 Outstanding Podcasts of 2018 – The Bello Collective
7. The Brand New Podcasts Of 2018 We’re Most Excited About – Refinery 29
8. The Best Podcasts of 2018 – Entertainment Weekly
9. The 20 Best Podcasts of 2018 – Lifewire
10. The Top 10 Podcasts of 2018 – Time
11. The 15 Best Podcasts of 2018 (So Far) – Esquire
12. Apple Presents the Best of 2018 – Apple
13. We Count Down the 30 Best New Podcasts of 2018 (So Far) – WhatPods
14. The 50 Best Podcasts of 2018 – The Guardian
15. The Best New Podcasts of 2018 – Thrillist
16. The Best Podcasts of 2018 – Relevant
17. The Best Podcasts of 2018 – The Sydney Morning Herald
18. The 50 Best Podcast Episodes of 2018 – IndieWire
19. The 25 Best Podcasts of 2018 – CBC
20. The 10 Best Podcasts of 2018 – Podcast Review

Things to note:

Between the 20 ‘best of’ lists above, there are 312 individual podcasts mentioned. Yes, I went through each list and tallied them up for you. If you want to see the spreadsheet that this work is contained on, here it is!

Here are the podcasts mentioned the most throughout the above lists:

• Caliphate was mentioned in 13/20 lists – DING DING DING! WINNER OF MOST MENTIONED. If you haven’t yet listened, a lot of people think you should.
• Slow Burn was mentioned in 10/20 lists
• In the Dark was mentioned in 8/20 lists
• Serial was mentioned in 7/20 lists
• Everything is Alive and ESPN’s 30 for 30 were mentioned in 6/20 lists
• Making Obama and the Habitat were mentioned in 5/20 lists
• The Dream and Headlong: Surviving Y2K were mentioned in 4/20 lists
• Binge Mode: Harry Potter and Armchair Expert were mentioned in 3/20 lists

There were some podcasts that were mentioned once that I believe should receive some more recognition:

• Red Flag
• Women Belong in the House
• Criminal
• Nocturne
• The Allusionist
• Today, Explained

There were some podcasts that were not mentioned on any of these lists that I believe should receive some more recognition:

• Modern Day Philosophers
• Gastropod
• Maculate Conception
• Unerased