The Podcast Marketing Academy (whose manifesto is HERE) has released results of a study conducted in Q1 this year. The field work interviewed 515 respondents, all of them podcasters. That group represents over two billion cumulative downloads and 28,000 produced episodes. The survey is characterized as “sadistically long and detailed.”
There is a splendid (but not cruel) and detailed multi-page description of the survey group in the release deck.
The Spectrum
Interestingly, the study made a graphical representation of the participating podcasts, showing the percentage of the whole group which landed on a spectrum of downloads per episode:
The governing inquiry behind this work: What are the factors that contribute to podcast growth? The effort was to identify meaningful differences between high-growth and low-growth shows. To that end, two identifying characteristics were put into play: Growth and Size (both based on self-reported data).
Download Trends
We learn how a median podcast receives monthly downloads over the course of a year:
The same dataset can be reconfigured to compare downloads per episode to episodes published, per month:
A key takeaway from Podcast Marketing Academy is a marked decrease in episode production over summer and winter holidays, and those dips are more pronounced than the previous year.
Growth? A 50/50 proposition
Here’s some hard truth for beginners:
“Many creators assume that there’s nowhere to go but up after launching a show. And while that may be true when you’re starting from zero, our findings clearly illustrate that for established shows, growth is not a given.”
In fact, as illustrated below, growth is basically an even-chance proposition.
A silver lining on this subject that is not obviously revealed in the graphic above: “In 2023, growth was the most likely outcome for shows of all sizes.”
A platform-specific story
The story of growth is nuanced according to the marketing platform. The study asked its participants about which marketing platforms they used, and the follower or subscriber counts over the past year. This interesting question yielded the very interesting results below.
Note that YouTube owns the greatest increase in this graph, but the lowest median number of followers/subscriber. Those numbers apply to the entire dataset for this question in the survey.
More…
We have covered the first two sections of this weighty release. Other sections are:
- Show Attributes Correlation with Growth Rate
- What High-Growth Podcasts Do Differently
- Summary Section with Closing Thoughts
Do This Next
We want to emphasize the value of studying this report in the original release, which is HERE. We are skimming. The public deck (which is really a gigantic single-page infographic) is a powerful, detailed reference for all creators and other participants in podcasting. Getting it is the next step.
One cool feature we have never seen before: Every participating podcast (515 or them) is listed and linked at the bottom.
