The podcast gold rush seems to have passed its peak…
According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine, the number of newly created podcasts decreased by 80% in 2022 compared to just two years ago.
Table of Contents
Mics dropping
During the start of the 2020 pandemic, more than one million new podcasts took flight.
But last year only gave birth to 219,178 new podcasts—100k+ fewer podcasts than in 2019.
The number of podcast episodes also fell to 26.1M new episodes in 2022 compared to 30M in 2020 and 29.5M in 2021.
But listeners are still listening
The majority of existing podcasts deal with societal and cultural topics (500,000), followed by education (462k) and arts (347k).
If you’re running a business podcast, you’re competing with 330k others. while there are 228k podcasts in the health and fitness niche.
So there are still large audiences in all these categories.
Why we care
Yes, podcast numbers are slowing down a little bit. Of course, it may just be consolidation after the initial pandemic boom, rather than a signal of any serious downtrend.
Keep in mind, too, that podcasts are more of a hassle to create, promote, and maintain than TikToks, Reels, or similar content. So it makes sense that many will burn out naturally.
Either way, it’s still a channel worth creating content for, or advertising in!