Signal Hill Insights

Signal Hill Insights is a Toronto-based research firm that's become the de facto source for serious podcast audience research in North America. They run custom studies for broadcasters, publishers and advertisers, and increasingly the kind of large-sample panel work that the industry has been missing.

The Canadian Podcast Listener is their longest-running study, surveying tens of thousands of consumers each year on listening habits, video versus audio consumption, and brand recall. 2025 covered roughly 86,000 respondents, with 66,000 monthly podcast consumers, and the team conducted nine times more video podcast brand lift studies than the year before.

The 2026 launch worth knowing about is Audio on the Move, billed as Canada's first holistic 'share of ear' study covering terrestrial radio, digital audio, streaming, satellite, podcasting, and emerging platforms. Findings drop in late spring.

None of this is a tool you click around in. Signal Hill is a research engagement: you commission a study, they run it, you get a report and often a custom dataset. Pricing is bespoke and starts in the high four figures for smaller projects, scaling into six figures for syndicated studies.

The team is small enough that work tends to be done by senior researchers rather than handed off, which is part of the appeal. If you're a network with a question your hosting analytics can't answer, or an advertiser wanting genuine brand-lift measurement, this is the firm. If you wanted a SaaS dashboard, look elsewhere.