La web Podcast Industry Insights has updated its analytics figures when it comes to podcasts, and a portion of these calculations are focused on Apple’s official Podcasts app. The figures are interesting: Apple already has more than two million podcasts in its catalog, but you have to treat that number with caution.
I say that because, as reflected from MacRumors, only 720,000 of those two million podcasts have more than ten published episodes. 36%. In other words, there are many podcasts with very few published episodes, with hundreds of thousands of them having only one chapter to listen to.
Towards a redefinition of the podcast market
This is important for several reasons. First because the most successful podcasts are usually those that publish episodes periodically, and we find ourselves involved in rumors that speak of the arrival of exclusives and a market premium on podcasts.
In fact, in iOS 14.5 we will stop ‘subscribing’ to podcasts to ‘follow’ them, in what is suspected to be a previous step to dedicating the verb of subscribing to something paid. And we are already beginning to see company movements to sign famous podcasters and thus have their audios exclusively. We will go from having several platforms where everyone will be to something similar to movies and series: each service will have its exclusives and there will be competition.
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And for that we will see a lot of podcasts trying to enter the race to be successful, although for now what we see is that a a good part of them stay a few steps after starting. Another figure to highlight this fact from the source: 44% of the podcasts available in Apple’s Podcasts application have published three or fewer episodes in total.
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