September 2024: Tuning In to the Canadian Podcast Ecosystem

Résumé analytique

This fifth edition of the Canadian Information Ecosystem (CIE) Situation Report reviews the state of politics, media, and democracy in September 2024. Facebook data is excluded this month following Meta's decision to shut down its platform-monitoring research tool. Four key findings stand out. TikTok increasingly dominates news engagement: after months of comparable levels with X/Twitter, TikTok took the lead in September, attracting between 34% and 58% of social media engagement for Canadian news outlets, while X/Twitter fell to second place with a 17% drop. Trust in elected officials declined, with a 5-point month-over-month drop; journalists remain the most trusted information gatekeepers (54%), only 28% of Canadians trust elected officials, and Big Tech ranks last (25%).

Podcasts play a growing role, especially for the politically interested: production of politics and news podcasts has risen since January 2023, with the most dramatic increase in the past six months, and roughly 17% of Canadians listen at least weekly, with notable differences by gender, age, language, and political interest. Canadians overwhelmingly favour American podcasts—71% of podcasts consumed in Canada are from the US and 12% are international, fewer than 20% are Canadian, and only 4 of the top 20 political podcasts (20%) are Canadian. Finally, the CBC surged, displacing CTV as the top news outlet, jumping almost 20% and earning nearly a third of all news engagement (from 12% to 30%); BlogTO entered the top five for the first time in third place, tied to TIFF interest, alongside a rise in local news engagement from 20% to 34%.