late 1990s at Eyada.com, the first Internet-exclusive live streaming radio station, broadcasting out of New York City. In 2014, This American Life launched the first season of their Serial podcast. The podcast was a surprise success, achieving 68 million downloads by the end of Season 1 and becoming the first podcast to win a Peabody Award. The program was referred to as a "phenomenon" by media outlets and popularized true crime podcasts. True crime programs such as My Favorite Murder, Crimetown, and Casefile were produced after the release of Serial and each of these titles became successful in their own right. From 2012 to 2013, surveys showed that the number of podcast listeners had dropped for the first time since 2008. However, after Serial debuted, audience numbers rose by 3%. Podcasting reached a new stage of growth in 2017 when The New York Times debuted The Daily news podcast. The Daily is designed to match the fast pace of modern news, and the show features original reporting and recordings of the newspaper's top stories. As of May 2019, it has the highest unique monthly US audience of any podcast. Download records Due to the fragmented delivery mechanisms and various other factors, it is difficult to externally nail down a precise listenership figure for any one podcast (although podcasters themselves can generally get fairly accurate data if they so please, which is especially useful for securing advertising contracts). As of December 2018, Serial was believed by some sources to be the most downloaded podcast of all time, with 420 million total downloads, surpassing Gervais's 300 million figure from back in 2011. However, Stuff You Should Know has accrued more than a billion downloads, and there are others still that have also hit this figure. According to Podtrac, NPR is the most popular podcast publisher, with over 175 million downloads and streams every month; however, Joe Rogan claimed in 2019 that his podcast alone was receiving 190 million downloads a month—a claim that is very likely true—and therefore makes his show the most downloaded podcast of all time in terms of both average viewership and total downloads. Indeed, Rogan signed a $100 million licensing deal with Spotify due to his unprecedented success with the medium. Nielsen and Edison Research reported in April 2019 that they had logged 700,000 active podcasts worldwide. Their research also revealed that, per capita, South Korea leads the