Congratulations, there are now over 100 million podcast episodes available
The number of downloadable podcast episodes available on your Apple Podcasts feed has now surpassed 100 million.
This is according to data crunched by Daniel J. Lewis, who runs a stats-heavy website called Podcast Industry Insights.
While it may appear at first glance to be a graveyard of abandoned podcasting dreams, the truth is far more daunting: these are all “valid podcasts with downloadable episodes, regardless of age or active status”.
The 100,323,931 podcast episodes are stretched across 2.73 million podcasts.
710 new podcasts (not episodes) were added in the last day, while 18,894 were added in the last month.
As Lewis explained: “There have been many more podcasts and many more episodes, but they are not all still available through valid feeds due to feed-episode limits.”
“Apple also actively removes podcasts, with 63,770 episodes removed manually or automatically over the past 30 days for “technical problems, hiding or removing by podcaster’s choice, or policy violations.”
Not surprisingly, the number of ‘inactive’ podcast, which Lewis defines as not having uploaded a new episode for 90 days, far outweighs the active ones. This isn’t surprising given the high attrition rates, plus the limited-series format of most podcasts – after all, Serial is technically an inactive podcast.
Somewhat depressingly, Lewis’ data confirmed the notion that podcasting has an easy bar to entry but is a hard habit to form, with the majority of podcasters giving up after their first episode.
As Lewis noteed: “While you may have heard some claim most podcasts don’t go past their seventh episode, this data shows that a single episode is the largest hump most podcasts will face.”
So, if you get to episode two – consider yourself in rare air.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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