The podcasting industry is booming. Statistics show that there are millions of podcasts published (4 million according to Podcast Index and 3 million according to ListenNotes). When looking at some podcast statistics even further, things look especially impressive. According to ListenNotes, there were nearly 197,000 new podcasts released in 2018. The next year, that figure jumped to 316,000. The growth seemed quite significant in 2019, but 2020 brought more than 1,000,000 new podcast shows(!), a record number which more than tripled the previous year. In 2021 and 2022, the growth trend seemed to go down a little bit, but the number of newly released episodes per year is still quite constant at around ~28 million per year in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
While 2023 stats can’t be fully analyze yet, we gathered a few key statistics in this article that goes through previous years, and we’ll update the article with fresh data as soon as we find it.
It’s still early to determine whether the figures from 2020 and beyond will hold, but podcasting is definitely here to stay. There are many different podcast statistics around the internet, we’ll try to gather some of the most relevant ones in this article.
2023 podcast statistics:
How many podcasts are there?
There are currently around 3 to 4 million podcasts out there, according to ListenNotes. According to Amplifi and Podnews, 44% of the podcasts have less than 3 episodes! Only 720k podcasts have more than 10 episodes. They also share that out of those 720k podcasts, only 156k are releasing a weekly episode.
PodcastIndex.org suggests that there are in fact over 4 million podcasts, but we couldn’t determine the reason the stats differ that much from ListenNotes. The folks at ListenNotes claim they filter out dead podcasts or shows that have no episodes, so that may be the more accurate number.
How many podcast listeners are listening to podcasts on a weekly basis?
According to Edison Research, more than 80 million people in the US are listening on a weekly basis. You can only imagine the number on a global scale, as podcasting is really available everywhere.
Podcast listener projections for 2024
According to Statista, there would be 100 million people who listen or listened to a podcast in the US alone. With many new podcasts launching every day, and new listeners joining on board, we can only expect this number to grow further in the future.
How many active podcasts are there?
There are about 700k active podcasts. The term “Active” is a little hard to define. If we only look at podcasts that released at least one episode in 2022, the number is about 500,000. Listeners can still listen to older podcasts that have not released any episodes this year, and some shows are just taking a short break, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the podcasts are actually dead.
Where are podcasters coming from?
Most of the podcasters are coming from the US (1.4M to be precise). While India and China have the most listeners, they only account for 42k podcasts.
What is the number one podcast in the world?
According to Spotify‘s statistics page, the current number 1 podcast in the world is “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. This information shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Spotify decided to acquire the Joe Rogan Experience show for about $200 million during 2020. Joe Rogan’s podcast had one of the most popular YouTube channels at the time, and once acquired by Spotify – it’s exclusively available on Spotify. It’s important to note that Spotify are not sharing their full podcast listening stats, so it makes it a little hard to compare with other shows. Services like Chartable, Podtrac or ListenNotes can sometimes provide more comprehensive stats and podcast ranking. Keeping podcasting as an open format of distributed RSS feeds would help tracking the number one podcast at all times.
What languages are most podcasts in?
1.3M podcasts are in English. The second most popular language, Spanish, is far behind with only 220k podcasts.
Conclusion – Podcast Statistics
The podcasting industry is growing – both in podcasts created and listenership. It’s not too late to start a podcast. You can find listeners all over the world, so just pick a topic and genre you’re interested in so you could speak with passion for a long time.
Then make sure to market and share your podcast with potential listeners. A podcast website might come in handy here, so check out Podcastpage.io if you need a website for your podcast.
This article include data from the 2021 Infinite Dial Edison report, Nielsen-Podcasting Today 2021 report, ListenNotes.com, and PodcastIndex.
