How many podcasts are there? Too many. I have some numbers.
I ran across a site called Listen Notes which tracks podcasts. They recently published some fascinating stats about the state of podcasting. If you’re thinking about starting your own podcast, best have a look at these numbers first.
- Number of podcasts in the universe: At least 3,075,167
- Number of podcast episodes: At least 160,974,895
Listen Notes says: “By contrast, IMDB has over 8.3 million titles (movies, TV shows, TV episodes), Spotify has over 70 million tracks, and Audible has over 470,000 audiobooks.”
That’s a lot of audio. And it appears that the podcast boom has gone bust. Over a million podcasts were launched in 2020. That fell to about 730,000 in 2021 and just 231,172.
Here are more numbers.
- Most popular languages for podcasts: English (1,858,105) followed by Spanish (354,392), Portuguese (207,550), Indonesian (142,148), and German (83,591)
- Biggest source of podcasts: The US (1,968,186) followed by Brazil (197,151). Canada is way down the list with 17,577.
- Most popular topic for podcasts: Society and Culture followed by Education. The Arts are in third place.
There’s a lot more to be found at this page.
