Apple Podcast Industry Statistics You Can Use To Help You Stand Out

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Hey everybody, welcome back to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host and today I've got some really exciting news to share with you. This is sort of more of a current events type of episode. Apple has published some new test statistics industry insights from what they are seeing the largest podcast listening platform. Now, I know that a lot of you may be aware that Spotify is very up and coming and trying very hard to be a major listening destination to rival Apple. And they are up and coming. But what we see statistically from all of the 500 plus podcasts that we produce, manage and host is that Apple by far, most of the time, very few exceptions. But on the vast majority of shows, I mean 98% of shows, the majority of your podcast plays are going to come from an Apple related app either. Older devices that are still using itunes, which older Mac OS and iOS devices use iTunes. Newer ones all, it's called Apple Podcasts. The distribution mechanism is the same, but what it's called depends on what device and what software OS that you're on. And it's. So Apple is still really the dominant player in podcast listenership. No question. I was looking at a show out of Australia just yesterday that we host that is got quite good listenership. I mean, in the last 24 hours they got something like 24,000 plays. That's a lot. Now they did just publish an episode yesterday. I don't know that they get that every day, but this show, its primary listening app is Podcast Addict. That surprised the heck out of me because Podcast Addict, for most shows on the big, you know, graph pie chart of all the shows, usually Podcast Addict is this little sliver and it's a low single digit percentage of a show's plays. I was really shocked to see Podcast Addict was the dominant one for this, this particular show. And we've seen some that Spotify is the number one and Apple's number two, but very rare. I mean, like I'm saying, 98% of podcasts, Apple is still the dominant listening destination, which really makes sense for two reasons if you think about it. Number One, Apple invented the space. The podcast is called a podcast because of the ipod that Apple invented and started back. I mean, the first podcasts date back to like maybe 2004, ish, 2005 maybe. And the reality is Apple, because of number one, inventing the space and number two, the iPhone as a device now is for any single type of phone, is the most popular cell phone. And of course on that operating system, iOS, Apple Podcasts is built in. So that makes sense, right, as to why they would be number one. Now, of course, Android has a bigger market share of cell phones total, but there are some Samsung phones, Motorola phones and you know, Nokia phones, all sorts of different Google phones that use the Android operating system and they have different apps much that people listen, a lot of different apps. I think Tracy, she's an Android phone user and she listens on Google podcasts or she used to listen more on Stitcher. Stitcher's gone through some changes and it's come up with a new app and they're getting to be a little more popular, but definitely have a single listening app. Apple Podcasts is the most dominant because it's built into the phone. That's what most people listen on. So it makes sense that Apple has really the most data to share. So I'm going to share with you some numbers and I may, I think, you know what, I'm also going to share my screen, I think to show you. This is an article that just came out, was just published and hopefully you can see that. So Apple podcast statistics, their podcast industry insights is the link and I can have this link in the blog post for this episode for you to check out.

So they can toggle here between monthly and daily numbers. I've got it now on monthly. So this is amazing. So the total number of valid podcasts. Now let's talk about what valid means. Okay, Valid means podcast feed or show that has been submitted to Apple and meets all of their requirements to be a podcast on their app. So that means a legitimately published podcast. So up over 2 million now. Just over 2 million 2 million 446,002 to be exact. And that is as of March of 2021. And if you look back to a year ago March, it was under a million. Isn't that amazing? I mean, all of the podcasts from the beginning of the industry until now, we have always in the last, honestly, in the last year we've been talking about there's something north of a million total podcasts that have ever been created and published. And that Is true. But in the last year, it's exploded. You had the entire growth of podcasts in 15, 16, maybe 17 at most. Years of podcasts took that long to get a million. And in the last year, we've gotten a million more. I mean, does that blow your mind? It blows my mind. This is staggering information. Just shows you how much podcasting has exploded in the last year. And we've been feeling that as a company at Brandcasters, Pod Ties. We've been feeling it and seeing it. Our business was very strong in 2020. It was our best year yet. And so these numbers bear that out. So in the last year, it's gone from just under a million to over 2 million. Amazing. Total number of episodes available. So remember, the first number was number of shows, meaning feed your brand is a podcast, the binge factor is a podcast, your show is a podcast. That's those numbers. But the number of episodes. 47,557,422.

Wow. And that's the total number of episodes available to listen to as of the publishing of this article and this information. What Apple has disclosed. Amazing. So that. What is that? An average of a little under 25 episodes per show that are out there now. Of course, some shows are brand new and have launched with 1, 2, 3, or, you know, some small number of episodes and are starting to publish them little by little. Others are very mature shows. I mean, we have a show on our platform that has over 800 shows that have been done. One of my very first podcasts has 650 episodes. So clearly that average is. You have a lot of podcasts with very few. And don't forget, these totals include podcasts that have pod faded. Now, let's talk about what that means again. POD faded is, is when a show launched with at least one episode. That's the minimum. You can't launch a show and Apple won't accept it unless you have at least one published episode. We often recommend publishing a minimum of three, and very often we recommend publishing more than that on day one. But some shows really don't get very far past that. They pod fade statistically after, I believe it's 7 episodes or 11 episodes or somewhere in the 23ish episodes. Usually a show that gets past 25 statistically sticks with it for a much longer period of time and ends up still publishing episodes at least past 100 or somewhere between 100 and 300 or even more over a long period of time. So this 2,004,462 number is all shows that have at least one episode published. But a lot of those shows are not actively publishing new episodes. They're just still alive in the podcast ecosystem. So that's pod faded is they've stopped publishing new episodes, but they still have maintained an active podcast show in their podcast hosting subscription and it's still available for people to consume. So we're going to get to how many shows are active in a little bit because Apple has published that data. One of the other things that I think it's important to know is there are several podcast apps. I think there's three of them besides Apple podcasts that are different listening apps that they piggyback off Apple, meaning when your show is registered on Apple and approved by Apple, these other apps automatically pick up your feed. Sorry guys, this is live recording and I have some dogs and unfortunately something. So when you have inactive podcasts, that's, you know, pod faded. And so this number of over 2 million includes every thing that's ever published one episode, but may not be publishing current episodes. I'm going to change from monthly to daily here on this and. Oh, that's an exclusive. Okay, so in this article that I'm sharing, there's a lot of data Apple's giving for free and then there's more data you can get by paying. Now, I literally just found out about this information the day I'm recording this. And so I don't have all that information. But for those people that are clients apologetized and you join our weekly client coaching call, we are going to pay for the data and get it. It's not something every podcast really should do because it costs a bit of money, but we are going to pay and get that data and we'll come back to you with more information. So here's another really interesting stat that we found.

We found that in terms of additions and removals, okay, these are, I believe, shows. I'm going to go down here and make sure new podcasts are not added on the weekends or around holidays. But automatic removals can occur any day. Okay, so we're talking about data that is shows again, not episodes. So Apple added 5,000, 240 shows in the previous day. Isn't that staggering? Those of you launching a new show have you, you know, you wonder how many other shows are launching on the same day. And it's about 5,000 right now. That is a very interesting number as well. How many were added in the last month? Over 100,000. 105,326. How many are added in the last 90 days. 284,879. That's a lot of podcasts. Now, it still is nothing compared to the number of websites that get launched. So when you think about everybody in business knows, hey, you've got to have a website. It's like having a business card. You're not really in business if you don't have a website. But remember, there's more than a billion and a half websites out there. So as a podcaster, even though there are a lot more podcasts now than there used to be, you know, you're still playing in a very small pond. And you can stand out a lot more easily being a podcast host than you can having a website. So that's just something to keep in mind. So then if you look at the. Not just the number added in the last days, you know, they have some graphs so you could see how many were added sort of each day of the month. It seems that on Mondays they add the most shows. So those days are averaging out. Like on a Monday, it might be 5,800, another Monday, 6,248, another Monday, 6,900. But other days of the week, like if you go later in the week, you're talking about 2,000 added in a day. So the average, if you think about it, of 100,000 within a month, your average is about north of 3,000. Like 33, 3400 a day. Day new shows get added. That's amazing. Then they have some information about shows that were removed. And this would be, if you want to delist your show, make it no longer available in the podcast ecosystem. You can do that. That would be what is known as canceling your hosting subscription. Okay. If you cancel your hosting subscription, your show would come off all the apps. So they. In the last 30 days, there's 8,532 shows been removed. 130 the previous day beginning. If you take 8,532 and divide that by 30 days, you get an idea of how many. And in the last 90 days, almost 19,000 shows removed. And that would be people removing it. Okay, so here we go. This is really interesting data here. Remember I talked about that number? Just over 2 million active podcasts today. 37 and 1/3% are. Are active. So that means about 700,000 or so. About 700,000 are active now. That's more than we thought. The latest data we had from about a year ago that we were talking about when people would ask, we thought about 350,000. About 350,000 shows were active of the roughly 1 million-ish podcasts. But remember I showed you in the very beginning, in the last year, it's gone from just under a million podcasts to just over 2 million. And if you take 350,000 at about double that, the number in proportionally and. Or the ratio, I guess, of active podcasts to total podcasts is holding pretty close. I would have said it's about 35% ish, and they're saying it's 37%. So before I had this more updated data, that's what I had been saying. Obviously, now I have more information. So very interesting stuff. Then let's see. Activity. Let me see. There's some other. I'm reading through some of this data here and just sharing it with you.

In terms of how old is the newest episode from podcasts? So this will give you an idea about pod fading and how many people are sticking with it. So what they're saying is that the newest episode, which I think there's a different way to state this. I don't think Apple's really using the right language to communicate this. What this chart is showing is that in the last seven days that there are 273,284 podcasts that published a new episode. Remember the active podcasts? I said there's about 37%. So about somewhere in the 750,000, maybe 770,000 probably in that range of shows that are active, you know, podcast shows now you've got 273,284 that are published in the last seven days. Some and then additional ones that published in the last eight to 30 days. Another 240,000 in the last 90 days, another 233,000. So now we get to shows that the last episode. How old is the newest episode from a podcast, meaning they published their latest episode somewhere between 91 days ago and a year ago, is 726,951. So these are what I would call. I mean, honestly, in my criteria, a show that is pod faded, at least temporarily, has not published an episode in the last 30 days. But there. This criteria suggests that maybe more people who haven't published an episode in the last 90 days, those shows have pod faded. And then you go into one to two years and the 233,000 and it gets smaller from there. So again, really interesting data. So then this is interesting available episodes. Okay, so 25.86% of shows have one episode available. 10.5% of shows have two available. 6.7% have three available. 9.4. About 9.5% have four to five episodes available. And then it goes on. So 36.5% of shows have 10 episodes or more available. So you remember when I was saying, you know, with the total number of shows out there, that if you just average it out, that the average number of episodes per show is about 25ish episodes, I believe is what I said earlier here. This would show you that here's why only 36.5% of all those 2 million shows out there have more than 10 episodes. That is amazing. That is very interesting numbers.

Okay, so then the last chart that's public here that that Apple is sharing is activity by episodes.

So active podcasts with one episode is 111,000 active podcasts with. So they're showing active and inactive. I'm focusing on active. Active shows with two episodes, 52,000. So let's go down to active shows with 10 or more episodes. 406,000. Interesting. So that's, that's really some interesting data and I find this really fascinating. I think any of you podcasters who've been doing this for a long time, I think will as well find this stats really interesting. And like I said, we're going to go and download and pay for all the stats and then help make that available to all the people that we're working with. But even though the volume of shows has increased, it's very interesting to see the percentages have continued and the ratio of active to inactive is almost the same. Maybe it's ticked up 2% from what we knew it to be about a year ago. Really, really interesting data and I think gives you a really good idea that the podcast industry is still very strong. People are finding more value in it. The ratios are the same, but the volume's increasing. So I think that means people are still finding as much value in it as they were a year ago and as they were even a few years ago. And wow. I mean, is that. It's just fascinating stuff. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. I hope you found that of value. Those of you listening to the podcast episode, you can go to the blog post@poditize.com for this episode where we're going to have some snapshots of those graphs in images so you can see them. We'll also have the video embedded there if you want to watch this as a video and link to the source article. So if you want to go look at it yourself, you're welcome to. And you know what? I hope you found this as valuable and interesting as I did. All right, thanks very much for listening, everybody. This has been Tom on feed. You'd brand.

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