Podcasting Industry Report Specifically for Independent Podcasters
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Actively established podcasters are interview-based show hosts with more than 100 episodes released without missing beyond a percentage of episode releases along the way. They’ve consistently created content for their podcast since launching! (For more, that’s 2 years, based on a weekly release cadence.) For more on this, see Alex Sanfilippo’s original announcement, here: https://podmatch.com/news/actively-established . For an independent interview-based podcast, we’ve found that it takes 100 episodes before meaningful traction begins. Growing your influence and impact with listeners begins at 100 episodes, so that’s what we’re tracking!

This report is based on filtering out all the shows that don’t actually matter. The Actively Established Podcast Report displays interview based independent podcasts only. All celebrity podcasts, non-interview based, big network podcasts, and podcasts with only one episode have been removed from the results. (Some newer/smaller shows from larger networks may be included in the data above.)

We pull +/- 15 days of data to use as our sample unit within the following ranges: 8 weeks, 50 weeks, 100 weeks, 200 weeks, 300 weeks of current day.

Once we have these sample units, we review the percentages of success/failure in each range after averaging outliers and hosting providers who do not reach the minimum criteria.

From there, we have 39 separate formulas applied to calculate the datapoints. All fully automated, no manual adjustments made to the algorithm that’s deciding scoring and ranking. The size of a hosting provider has minimal effect on their rank, what matter is activity of podcasters and the episode release milestones that they reach. (Release cadence, total episodes released, and sample unit milestones are the top factors contributing to rank.)

TWO MANUAL ACTIONS: If a podcast host gates/hides email addresses by default, they receive +50 points. If a hosting provider is a member of podstandards.org, they receive +50 points. (NOTE: The hosting provider data only shows independent interview-based podcasts.)

We make suggestions on which hosting providers should be used, and avoided, within the Actively Established Podcast Formula Course. For free access to this $1,200.00 course, please complete the PodScore.io quiz and you’ll be granted access to our hosting provider suggestions and exclusive discounts!

Hosting providers will rank higher if they assist more of their podcasters go from the “Up-and-Coming” column in the table above to the “Established” column. To achieve this, hosting providers must help podcasters reach the milestones referenced in the “Chances of Success & Failure as a Podcaster” section above in this report.

The secret to achieving this is some: Guide podcasters through their first 12 months of podcasting! (Help podcasters go from 8 episodes to 50 episodes)

If you’re serious: Email Alex Sanfilippo at team@podmatch.com for the exact solution to make this happen with minimal effort.

All data was pulled by our partner, Rephonic.com. Rephonic counted the number of podcasts by each hosting provider by RSS feed domain.

We use a combination of publicly available data from demandsage.com, nielsen.com, statista.com, exploringtopics.com and edisonresearch.com.

Specific sources:

► Global Listenership Projections: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/podcast-listeners

► Listenership Deep Dive: https://content.nielsen.com/PodcastingToday

This total is determined amount all people who listen to independent podcasts that we track. Big network podcasts, celebrity podcasts, and podcasts that do not do interviews are excluded from the total listenership calculation. Again: This is strictly among independent listenership!

To determine the listenership data, we categorized podcasts into two groups: Actively Established (Group A) and active podcasts that have not yet reached the 100 episode mark (Group B)

GROUP A: Actively Established (Podcasts with 100+ episodes and a release cadence of 10 days or less.) We analyzed 2,000 randomly selected podcasts in this group and found the average listeners per podcast to be 3,472. The total listenership for Group A was calculated to be 6,944,000.

GROUP B: This includes active posts that have not reached 100 episodes. We analyzed 2,000 randomly selected podcasts in this group and found the average listeners per podcast to be 175. The total listenership for Group B was calculated to be 350,000.

Combining the total listenership of both groups, we calculated the overall listenership to be 7,294,000. Group A accounts for 95.20% of the total listenership, while Group B accounts for 4.80%. This analysis highlights the significant impact of podcast consistency and longevity on attracting a larger audience.

Our partner, Buzzsprout, provided data on average industry downloads based on their internal data. Although they are specifically Buzzsprout’s numbers, they have enough market share for us to deem this as industry average.

We pulled data on podcasts from date-range criteria to determine how many succeeded or failed during that time. Every month, we update the date ranges to keep it current, while incorporating historical averages into the data. We pull based on weekly episode releases and follow the same “AE” standard as the rest of this report.

Rephonic uses automated Natural Language Processing to identify podcasts that accept guests and while it is usually very accurate, occasionally Rephonic may get it wrong.

Sometimes Rephonic doesn’t find associated social accounts for a podcast, or link ones that are incorrect. Rephonic’s data is therefore not 100% accurate, but in aggregate these issues are minimized.