What Is The Latest Most Ideal Podcast Episode Length That Wins Listeners?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazard along with my co host, Tom Hazard, and we're here to talk about all the things happening in the podcasting world that you want to know about. And one of those things that we get the question about again and again and again is episode length. How long should your show be? And so we've decided to spin that a little bit because we've covered this topic before. But has the episode length, the podcast episode length changed over time. So is it different today than it was yesterday? That's what our topic is today. So, hey, Tom, what do you think? Has it changed?

Well, it's changed since the time when we started podcasting. I do think it has, but that's now about eight years in general. You're right, though. This is the number one question I get asked almost on a daily basis by either a prospect or a relatively new podcaster who's getting ready to launch their show, who's working with us. So very popular, often asked question. And the answer is usually very surprising, especially to new people. But I think there are some new things to consider as you're a seasoned podcaster in your podcasting journey.

Yeah, I mean, it's different answer if you're starting out than when you're seasoned. You already know your audience. So when you're starting out, you don't know your audience. So the advice in the general marketplace when we started our first podcast eight years ago was it should be the length of an average commute, which was 20 minutes, I think today. What is the average commute to your living room? Like, you know, five seconds. So, like, that doesn't bode well for a lot of the way, you know, the way the world works today. Right. So that's not good advice. And it actually turned out to not be great advice for us back then. But we, the first comments we got back from our listeners was, can you make the show longer? Like, we were shocked. They were like, they want to hear more from us. So it's really listener dependent. That's what we always tell everyone. But that sounds like such a vague answer. So here's my more generalized audience answer. And my more generalized audience answer is if you have an audience with a shortest attention span, if your focus is all tiktokers, if your focus is digital marketers. Digital marketers have the attention span of a gnat. They don't want to hear anything that's not a sound bite. Like they just don't. They want something that's quick to consume. So the Buffer app, which is a social media posting app, actually has a podcast. And when they started their podcast, they had a really long episode. And the thing that they discovered was that all of their audience was crashing out within the first five minutes, which is not typical for, for your average consumption time of podcasts. We typically see people listen 70% or more through any episode, no matter what the length is. That's the average of it. So here, if they're crashing through that episode in five minutes and not really listening to the whole thing, barely consuming 10% of it, then it's not working. It wasn't working for them. And that's because their audience was all social media marketers. They really wanted something quick, not something long. So, so when they shifted their show to an under 10 minute format and they focused it on a single topic, they did a whole lot better. And now their show, they just do more of those a week to kind of still do 30 minutes of show, which is what they wanted. So they still get the amount of content they. Wow, they just do more of it. And that's how they compensate for the sort of total time. So in essence, they're still doing 30 minutes a week. Right. So the difference of it is, is what your audience is willing to consume and to listen to, but the second part of it is your business focus. And I think, Tom, you can talk about that a little bit. If your business focus is in a certain area, then you need to have a specific length to meet that business focus.

Right. We honestly, we find for the vast majority of podcasters that we work with that their audience prefer deeper dives into small niche topics. And they don't just want that five, ten minute episode, that's more of an appetizer, they want the full meal. And even if they have a 20, 25 minute commute in the morning and in the evening, they will listen to half the episode in the morning and half the episode in the evening on their way back. Or if they've only got 30 minutes to listen and you've got a one hour episode, they'll put it on Double speed playing back in their app, which most of you probably know. But in case you don't, most listening apps will allow people to play back at one time speed, which is normal one and a half times, two times and more. And two times speed actually for most people doesn't sound all that odd. You'd be surprised, especially if you're listening.

To it might be a little odd for my voice, right.

If you're listening to me, I'm a little slower, more deliberate speaker. And you might want to listen to me because you're like, come on, Tom, hurry up, get on with it. Right? But Tracy, who speaks at like 90 miles an hour a lot of the time might be a little much to catch everything.

I'm told I'm 1.2 to 1.5. That's what I'm told by binge listeners on our shows. So that's what I hear. But what we have is there's been significant studies out there that kind of high, we call them pod fasters, fast consumption of it that there isn't. They've done studies with students in learning situations. And one and a half times speed of consuming content in general is fine. Two times you start to lose a little bit unless the speaker is slower, like that's the only difference there. But two times and you aren't actually absorbing enough information. So one and a half times is actually really good and very common. But this is what happens and that's why your episode length is going to get adjusted based on the listener's time commitment. Right. How much time can they commit?

Well, and you will, as you go from being a new podcaster to having an established show and having more listener engagement, you'll get feedback and you'll get a sense of is the length episode an issue for them one way or the other. And you know, I appreciate what you said up front, Tracy, about the example of a 10 minute episode. I'll tell you what we typically see. Podcasters that are recording a solo cast, meaning one person speaking in a monologue, tend to see an average length being 20 to 25 minutes, maybe 15 to 25. Okay. But if it's an interview episode or a dialogue to people talking, a lot of times we'll see an average being more 40, 45 minutes. But up to an hour is not all that uncommon. And of course there are extremes on either side of that. I would share with you from an SEO perspective if you're converting your episodes into blogs, which all the Potterized done for you, podcasters are having that done for them, for many good reasons that we've talked about on other episod episodes, is that a 20 minute episode is really the minimum for optimal SEO indexing of a blog post that comes, you know, speech to text from a podcast.

Think about your show notes, your blog, whatever that might be.

And there's no upper limit on that. Google likes longer form content.

Yeah, Google does. And so that reward on the digital side of things, on the digital marketing side of things, is going to reward you well.

Now there's snack size. We call it like sound bites. You know, 30 seconds is really common in social media, but you'll have tons of opportunities for 30 second clips if you're doing about 20 minute content. So all of that is still going to serve you. It doesn't need to match the final output that you're looking for. If that's what you're really looking for is jazzing up your Instagram or jazzing up your TikTok or whatever that is, you can have that content creation be much more longer tail and do more for you in general. So the two things I want you to think about as you're thinking about the length of your show and should you, if you already have a show, should you shift it? Like that's also a thought process, is have you heard feedback from your audience, who your audience is and when you're starting out? Sometimes we don't know. So that's why we go with our best guess. We do coaching calls, we do other things. We already know what that optimum length might be. Then you're good. You're kind of in that window. Go slightly shorter than what you would do on a Q and A or a coaching, because you're shortening up to not having that question and answer, not having that extra coaching time. Right. Not having the immediate audience feedback on the podcast side of things. So you want to make it a little bit shorter than that, but that's about it. You're kind of just measuring against that audience and their attention span. And then your business goals of is my goal to get clients from this is my goal to drive people to consume my course, buy my book, do some of these things. If it's any of those, you want to be on the size that Tom was just mentioning, 20, 25 minutes for solo, 40, 45 and all the way up to just under an hour. Try to keep it in the 55 range. Like we see if when you shoot hit over 60, there's a mental thing that happens there. So just keep it just under that 58 minutes, whatever it is, but keeping it under that is going to serve you better. Now, if your model is Joe Rogan model, where all you're doing is cramming advertising into everything and that's the sole purpose of the show, that its purpose is to take advertiser, then you want a longer show. Because if you have a longer show, you can squeeze more ads in, you have more spots to sell. So now you want to ease up on that over time. So if you're starting out and you're just like, hey, my goal is to have advertisers, but you're starting your show out, maybe you start your show out at 30 minutes because you could do two ads without any problem in a 30 minute, you could even do three, but I recommend two. Choose kind of a really good for a 30 minute show. So do a 30 minute show. Then after you've gotten like 25 episodes in, maybe you want to increase it up to 45 minutes. Now you can do three ads. And as you start to add advertisers and as you start to max out on your advertisements and filling those slots on a regular basis now, you will lengthen your show. That's actually how Joe Rogan did it. He didn't start out at 90 minutes in the beginning. I think he was only doing one hour in the beginning. But his format got longer and longer the more advertisers he got, because that was his sole purpose of his show. So you want to do the same if that's your purpose. But again, it's shifting over time. And so this is where the average length changes. Now here's what we say. Yes, show length has shortened, but the listen through is what we're really paying attention to. So if our show length is shortened and our listen through is going from, you know, 70% or more, we're doing really well. But if we shorten our show and it's not getting any more listenership, are we really serving our audience? Are we really doing well there? And if we do a longer show and we're getting crashed out, like in the buffer example, right, and they're crashing out faster, then we're really not serving ourselves, making more content than we need as well. So we want to optimize right around the point at which we're getting the optimum listenership. Listen as much through it as possible.

And what I'd like to share with our podcasters listening to this episode is that of course, if you're pre recording and you're not recording your show as A live stream. You can end up editing and making your show really any length you want. You just have to make decisions on what you want to cut from it and what you don't. But what we find is that podcast listeners, as different from radio, and let's just briefly touch on this, is that, you know, if you back in sort of the history of broadcasting, you had a radio show and you had an hour slot to fill, your show is going to be an hour every time, whether your topic really deserved an hour of time or didn't. And you'd be stretching content to fill that time and taking a break every 13 minutes for two minutes of commercials and get four of them in an hour. And it really was pretty contrived trying to fill all that airtime.

That's why they have segments though, and that's why they have the breaks, is because its purpose is an advertising feat. So keep that in mind.

Right? But in podcasting, it's really an entirely different kind of a relationship. First of all, you're not broadcasting things randomly and you're hoping there are enough people listening at the time you happen to be live on the air. You've got people opting in, they want to listen to your content, they're selecting and choosing you, they're interested in your topic, they want you to take a deep dive into a niche topic within your genre. And what we always recommend for length of time is, first of all, especially as a new podcaster, I don't recommend you watch the clock, decide what your topic is going to be and speak on that topic until it feels complete. Same thing if you're interviewing somebody. Interview them until you have really no more curiosity about, you know, you've had a good conversation and you don't have any more burning questions. Talk about that, have that discussion until it feels complete and end it. See what that length is. You can always edit it shorter if you need to.

So to sum up, the episode length hasn't changed, podcast episode length hasn't changed over time. It's still at what is best for the audience that you're trying to attract and the business model that you're going after. And that's where you fit into that. So think carefully about that. Think carefully about it. Maybe survey some of your audience, find out some before you set that. And don't worry, it's an experiment. You can always change this over time because you don't have to get stuck into the one hour radio model. You get to determine what your model is at each stage of your podcast. Journey.

All right. Well, hey, thanks for listening to this episode, everybody. We'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazard on Find.

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