
Podcast Stats - wenbin
https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/
======
mikece
While it's interesting to see how many podcasts there are in general, it would
be more interesting to know how many dormant podcasts there are and how long
the average podcast lasts. The original podcast, The Daily Source Code, is
still technically active (there is an RSS feed that works) but you cannot
download the history and there aren't any new shows (mainly because the RIAA
threatened to sue Adam Curry out of existence if he published another one).

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causality0
They did? I can't seem to find anything about that on Google. I wonder which
other podcasts have disappeared off the web. I'm a paranoid bastard so I have
complete archives of several shows I used to listen to.

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falcolas
> best podcast search engine and database

Interesting - I had never heard of this particular search engine before. All I
really use is iTunes and (rarely) spotify. And the occasional cross-promotion
from within a podcast.

Of particular interest from their dataset is the "Dead" vs. "New". It's
interesting how the "Dead" is level around 30k, while the new is a simple
exponential curve.

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mensetmanusman
With no commuting, I have stopped listening to podcasts. Is that showing up in
the data?

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ashtonkem
I listen to mine when doing chores, or any low-concentration task that I used
to listen to music during. This has not completely replaced the time I used to
spend commuting.

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redisman
Working out, walking the dog, doing chores, putting the baby to bed, while
playing games with no big story element. It's less total time but I still go
through quite a bit.

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cocoggu
The high figure compared to other medias need to be put in perspective. It's
possible that a lot of content is just a duplication for different languages.

Where a movie can get subtitles or dubbing, where a music don't need any
translation, an English podcast will only be listened by people fluent in
English and will need to be adapted for other languages, either by the
original podcaster or by a local one without any fear of copyright
infringement.

Thus it's hard to directly compare movies, music and podcasts figures
together.

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hombre_fatal
I listen to podcasts in other languages and have never encountered translated
podcasts, or rather, I don't think your hunch explains any significant
numbers. Edit: I just looked and lost interest before I could find a single
example of what you're talking about.

You may get spin-offs for other languages like Radio Ambulante (Spanish) for
NPR. But that's a whole other podcast in its own right, not a translation.

The difference in numbers should be obvious to you: anyone can start a podcast
that lands on podcast aggregators, and the production is just recorded voice
at minimum. Few people make movies or music that lands on imdb and spotify,
and the production is more than just recorded voice at minimum. Why wouldn't
you expect podcasts see much higher numbers in its stats?

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causality0
I found it very satisfying the perceptual lull I felt between essentially
stopping listening to podcasts between 2009 and 2012 echoed a period of slower
growth after the explosion of 2004-2007. Somewhat disappointing the charted
data only goes back to 2007 but very interesting just how dominant the United
States it when it comes to sheer volume.

Given how similar the current podcast "cultural gold rush" _feels_ compared to
the way it did slightly more than a decade ago, I can't help but wonder if
we're heading for another bust. The economic boomtimes that created so many
willing sponsors of the last four or five years are coming to an end, and the
onrushing economic difficulties are driving more and more people into
podcasting as a potential source of income. Can a whole industry support
itself on the pockets of Squarespace and Casper mattresses?

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sdenton4
I've heard podcasting called the slowest-growing new medium of all time... The
exponent for number of podcasts seems to be much higher than the exponent for
number of podcast listeners, for example.

[https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and-
podcasting/](https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and-podcasting/)

~~~
redisman
Doesn't look too bad. Monthly users are up 3x from 2008 to 32% of Americans.

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burkaman
I'm surprised English and the US are that dominant. Assuming it's not a data
problem, does anyone know why this is? Do other countries have different
outlets for a random person's "I want to make a show" impulse, or is it just
not really a popular idea outside the US?

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wenbin
The data only include publicly accessible RSS-based podcasts, which is a very
narrow definition of podcasts.

There are exclusive "podcasts" on Spotify that are not publicly accessible and
not distributed via rss.

There are other forms of spoken audio contents that are publicly accessible
but not distributed via rss.

Open RSS-based podcast ecosystem is less developed outside US, for countries
with comparable (or larger) population.

There are many walled garden audio platforms in countries like China. For
example, probably most of you haven't heard of Lizhi FM [0], a "podcasting"
platform from China that just went public early this year. Most of its audio
contents are not distributed via RSS.

[0]
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783407/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783407/000119312519276047/d762894df1.htm)

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scarface74
_There are exclusive "podcasts" on Spotify that are not publicly accessible
and not distributed via rss._

An audio program that isn’t published via an RSS feed is no more a podcast
than the proprietary pages that AOL use to host are “web pages.”

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jayflux
I thought the UK would have been higher up, I wonder if the fact that most
people use a US based host skews the results? I don’t know how listennotes do
heuristics for “podcasts by country” but I’d be interested to see.

In terms of dead podcasts, most podcasts don’t actually set the complete tag
(most likely to leave the door open for future eps) they just stop. So that
figure will be way higher in reality. When crawling Podcasts I came across a
lot of RSS feeds that were still up but hadn’t had a new episode for over 3-5
years etc

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doh
We recently published a study on the podcast market based on Apple Podcasts
[0]. I'm surprised by the numbers they claim as we see around a half of those
numbers across Spotify and Apple, but we deduplicate them, so maybe that's
why.

In any way, very interesting statistics.

[0] [https://blog.pex.com/podcast-growth-doubles-every-year-
over-...](https://blog.pex.com/podcast-growth-doubles-every-year-
over-7-million-hours-uploaded-in-2019-acbcba8c4a70)

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centimeter
Semi related, I find it fun to look at patreon top creator stats, which
includes a lot of podcasts: [https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-
creators](https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators)

Notable are Chapo Trap House, a communist/socialist podcast making nearly $2M
a year, and Cum Town, a low production value comedy podcast pulling in almost
$700k.

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pkamb
It’s crazy that there aren’t better tools for paid podcasts.

Chapo and C*town provide 2 RSS feeds. The free/paid feeds don’t show up next
to each other in your podcast app because they’re named differently (dumb). No
way to merge feeds in the popular podcast apps.

Smart producers like Stratechery/Dithering provide individual personal RSS
feeds that combine the free and paid. And deliver only the free if your
subscription lapses. But those are one-off CMSs that most Patreon podcasts
don’t have the means to deploy.

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ppur
The podcasts-over-time statistics remind me that podcasts are like the new
blogs.

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xs
wenbin, for stats on hosting providers, when it's like podtrac, do you count
both podtrac and the real host?

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wenbin
If there's redirect, then we use the final destination url, e.g.,
[http://feeds.podtrac.com/fRt6e7vOZ-19](http://feeds.podtrac.com/fRt6e7vOZ-19)
redirects to civilbeat.org..., so we use civilbeat.org

If there's not redirect, then we use the exact url, e.g.,
[http://feeds.podtrac.com/nice-peter](http://feeds.podtrac.com/nice-peter)
doesn't redirect, then it's podtrac.com

