Top Medical Podcast BackTable
Surpasses 3 Million Listens
Press Release • May 18, 2025
We’re excited to share that the BackTable Podcast surpassed 3 million total listens on June 15, 2025. We owe a special thank you to our Father’s Day listeners that helped us reach this new milestone.
BackTable launched its first show in 2017. BackTable Vascular & Interventional is now a primary learning resource and a household name amongst interventional radiologists, vascular surgeons, and interventional cardiologists. BackTable ENT and BackTable Urology, which launched in 2020 and 2021 respectively, have found similar success after multiple years of content creation, community engagement, and audience growth initiatives.
BackTable Listener Growth
* 2025 plays are forecasted based on 2025 year-to-date plays.
** Newer shows (BackTable OBGYN, MSK, and Tumor Board) are not shown
*** Vascular & Interventional peak: Apple Podcasts changed their play count methodology in November 2023, resulting in lower play count reporting from 2024 onward.
In a recent interview, BackTable CEO and founder Dr. Aaron Fritts reflected on what it takes to build a physician following in today’s busy media landscape. “Finding your audience with a niche medical podcast is all about patience and persistence. It takes years to change physician practice behaviors, and getting a medical specialty to adopt a new podcast and make a habit of listening happens on a similar timescale.”
Part of the reason that physician audience building is so challenging is that physician focus is fragmented, as Dr. Fritts explains. “You have to cover the right topics to get to that critical mass of listeners. Just thinking about my own specialty in interventional radiology, we’ve got docs that only do peripheral vascular disease, some only do interventional oncology, some focus exclusively on pain therapies, the list goes on and on. Speaking from personal experience, I’m only going to follow a medical podcast and become a habitual listener if I know it’s consistently relevant to me and what I do in my practice.”
Listenership by Specialty
* BackTable Listener stats as of June 22, 2025.
** 4,000 Interventional Radiologists; 3,000 Vascular Surgeons; 5,000 Interventional Cardiologists
Collectively, physicians now spend tens of thousands of hours with BackTable content every month, but this level of engagement from specialists takes significant time and investment to cultivate. “I’ve met so many other physicians and even industry partners who’ve dabbled in their own podcasting,” says Fritts. “Once the initial excitement of those first few recordings wears off, the engagement might not be where you want it to be, and that can be pretty demotivating. We learned early on that we needed to put as much effort into capturing physician attention as we did into content creation, if not more.”
BackTable continues to grow its audience and accelerate listenership through a multi-media podcast distribution strategy—social media, video, email, and SEO—enabling content discovery everywhere that the modern physician is seeking to learn and improve their practice.
Your Physician Audience is Listening to BackTable
Download the BackTable Media Kit to learn how you can engage physicians with authentic, on demand, peer-to-peer medical education.
About BackTable
BackTable is the podcast network for authentic, on demand, peer-to-peer healthcare education. With 6 shows serving more than 18 medical specialties, BackTable has featured over 1,100 episodes, 1,000 physician contributors, 90 industry partners, and 3 million podcast plays since its inception in 2017. Curated by physicians, for physicians, BackTable Podcasts focus on practical guidance that physician listeners can apply to their day-to-day practice. Partner with BackTable to be part of the conversation, and push healthcare forward with impactful discussions that reshape and refine how providers deliver care.
