Podcast creation drops in February as Covid creativity fades

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.

Brad Hill