Crime Junkie

Crime Junkie is a weekly true crime podcast hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat, lifelong friends who launched the show in December 2017 with approximately $13,000 in startup costs. It has grown into one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world, averaging 10 million weekly listeners. Apple Podcasts ranked it the number one show in 2022 and 2023, and number two in 2024, ahead of The Joe Rogan Experience that year. The show is the flagship property of audiochuck, a podcast network founded by Flowers.

Format and structure

Each episode follows a consistent structure: Flowers narrates a case in detail while Prawat reacts and asks questions, serving as an audience surrogate. The narrative style is immersive and suspense-driven, designed for binge listening. New episodes release every Monday. Content covers cold cases, missing persons, serial killers, wrongful convictions, and community justice efforts. The host dynamic, in which one tells and one responds, gives the show a conversational quality distinct from the solo narrator format used by many true crime podcasts.

The audiochuck network

Flowers founded audiochuck, which has grown from Crime Junkie into a portfolio of true crime and adjacent shows, including The Deck and Anatomy of Murder. The network has generated over three billion total downloads and carries an estimated valuation of $250 million. Flowers herself earns an estimated $45 million per year from the network. audiochuck is one of the clearest examples of the podcast-to-media-empire trend, in which a single hit show becomes the foundation for a media company.

Controversies

In 2019, journalist Cathy Frye accused Crime Junkie of lifting material from her reporting without attribution. Multiple other creators subsequently came forward with similar allegations. The show removed several episodes and issued a statement. The incident prompted broader discussion within the podcast industry about sourcing standards in true crime.

In 2025, the hosts of Anatomy of Murder, one of audiochuck's subsidiary shows, filed a lawsuit against the company. Details of the dispute relate to creative and financial disagreements within the network.

Topics

The show is narrowly focused on true crime and its sub-genres: cold cases, missing persons, serial offenders, and cases involving justice system failures. Unlike The Joe Rogan Experience or The Diary Of A CEO, which range across many subjects, Crime Junkie maintains a single genre focus, which supports habitual weekly listening and a dedicated community identity ("you've found your people" is a recurring tagline).

Audience and community

The show cultivates an active listener community that participates in case discussion, tip submission, and advocacy campaigns for unresolved cases. This community dimension distinguishes Crime Junkie from Dateline NBC, which covers similar material but from an institutional, reporter-driven perspective without the same level of listener interaction.

Connections to other top-10 shows

Dateline NBC is the closest neighbor: both cover true crime, but Dateline draws on NBC News resources and a television heritage, while Crime Junkie is podcast-native and host-forward. The Daily occasionally intersects with criminal justice stories but approaches them as news rather than narrative. The Rest Is History sometimes covers historical crimes from a contextual perspective that complements Crime Junkie's contemporary case focus. The show's guest overlap network is minimal with the interview-format shows in the top 10, as Crime Junkie is primarily host-narrated rather than guest-driven.

Key statistics