We’re Told Millions of Podcasts Are Produced Each Year. Not Exactly.

Millions of podcasts are produced each year, but only a tiny percentage of them are produced consistently…

By Paul Marszalek
TheTop22.com

For years we’ve heard about explosive growth in podcast production, resulting in millions of titles and episodes.

Spotify alone, which has bet big on the medium, announced this year that they were hosting 4.4 million podcasts. But not unlike the millions of songs on Spotify that never stream, the podcast number deserves examination.

In an analysis for Amplifi Media, reporter Steven Goldstein teamed with Podnews.net’s James Cridland to look under the hood.

What they found was amazing: Of roughly 4 million podcasts, just under 4% of them could be considered “active.” In short, just 155,764 had more than 10 episodes and had produced an episode in the past ten days. About half produced three or fewer episodes.

So the good news is, if you’re getting in the podcast game, you’re not competing with millions of podcasts. The bad new is, you’re competing with 156,000 – still a huge number. As Goldstein points out, this compares with 74,000 audiobooks and 559 scripted television series.