In what might be an indication of podcast creation settling down from the Covid surge, the number of newly created shows in February was only 11% of a year ago. This measurement from Listen Notes.
In the February 2021 count, over 93,000 new podcasts launched, compared to 10,564 last month. There was a big month-over-month drop, too: January of this year saw 17,228 new shows drop into the space.
The annual count of new podcasts reveals the Covid-influenced shape of people experimenting with podcasts:
The post-Covid surge-and-fade was evident in the 2019-2020-2021 trendline. If we project full-year 2022 based on the first two months (not a statistically viable experiment, but we’ll do it anyway), we see full-year 2022 new podcasts settling at 168,000 — substantially fewer than the 704,000 of 2021.