The most, and least, crowded active podcast categories
Just before the Podcast Movement conference, we released our most-read post ever. Along with Podnews.net editor James Cridland we analyzed the 4 million podcasts listed in Podcast Index and found only 13% had produced an episode in the last 90 days, and only 4% had produced ten episodes and a new one in the last week.
This post generated a lot of buzz and a good deal of feedback ranging from “this is great” to, “this must be wrong.” It is not wrong, it is a very good reminder that generating quality content that garners a following is always difficult.
the most, and least, crowded active categories
A few readers asked what categories contained the most prolific podcasters: ten or more episodes and one released in the last week. We ran the data from the same time frame as our original analysis and found that Religion and Spirituality topped the list. Initially, this came as a surprise, but indeed it is the category with the largest episode count.
Roughly 155K podcasts with over ten episodes have been updated over the last ten days.
You can see the most prolific podcasters listed by primary category (i.e., the first category they list). The primary category is the one Apple Podcasts uses for charts.
This data does not reflect how many of the 155K podcasts performed at the top of the charts. For example, True Crime only has 661 entries that met our criteria, but proportionally it outperforms most categories with fewer titles but more top performers.
Think Noodle House, not Hamburger Place
In practical terms, this data shows some real traffic jams.
While the core group of active podcasts is fewer than the over-quoted 4 million or 2 million podcasts, it can be daunting to look at this chart and think getting a toehold will be easy for the next Society or News podcast - 15,000 podcasts in the society vertical and 14,000 in the news vertical released a show last week. Do you really want to launch a daily news podcast? Going head-to-head could be futile.
Granted, the top categories are very broad, and so there may be some tasty niche categories within, but many, if not most, are likely over-saturated. Scroll down on the chart above and look at some smaller underserved categories. They represent some potentially juicy opportunities.
A thoughtful content flanking strategy may yield greater traction.
I love to think about content flanking. The old zig while everyone else zags. Flanking has never been a more relevant strategy than today and is widely used in just about every business. The TV series Yellowstone was a flank. No one had seen westerns in years. Softsoap flanked hand-soap competitors.
As you select topics for a new podcast, looking at the traffic ahead should be a consideration. A noodle house may do better than another burger joint.
We just announced a benchmark study with the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) focused on local podcasts. If you are a local commercial broadcaster in the U.S., “The Local Podcast Opportunity” will be of paramount interest as the category heats up with some big companies and scrappy podcast companies investing in the space. More info on what it is about and how to participate is here.