I wanted to like podcasts, but never found one that wasn't either incredibly boring or incredibly grating to listen to.<p>Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I'm rarely if ever interested in the speaker of whatever information I'm trying to consume, and podcasts' focus on guests (and hosts) always came off as self-aggrandizing and people speaking just to hear themselves speak. Especially with very little editing (uhs, pauses, and general dysfluency) and/or preparation (winding conversations with a lot of fluff instead of a structured outline), I'd almost always just prefer to listen to a narrated book or textbook on whatever topic I'm interested in.
After a while I realized that a fairly amount of podcasts/episodes have pretty low density information throughout say a 3 hours talk. There are those gems where sufficiently good preparedness of the interviewer (e.g. read the book and came prepared with a set of well thought-out notes) is met with a suitable rhetorical skill/confidence of the interviewee.<p>But, alas, I would lie to myself if I believe podcasts are <i>driven</i> by the above.<p>Personally, I like to hear <i>interesting</i> people talk, it became much a tilted board, so for some time, now, I've cut down my consumption considerably and try to appreciate it as a digital <i>social treat</i> rather than actually knowledge building (very limited).<p>For that there must be some large enough "active" part involved and as a mere listener I get too comfy too easily. It is a bit like not writing down your ideas, the moment you commit them to "paper" most of the time they are not so "great" anymore and you realize there is more nuance to it ;)
A personal story about podcasts is that I usually listen to them during my commute. That means my podcast consumption went way down when the pandemic happened and I started mainly working remotely. I just don't have a defined suitable time for them anymore.<p>A few weeks ago I was sick and I put on some podcasts as I was resting. Made me realize how much I miss the content.<p>I wonder how much the radio/podcast industry is reliant on car radios and such.
I've lost interest in podcasts recently because it feels like the same people are just round-robining from host to host. It's all the same people.. Huberman feels like a lab manufactured podcast meme machine, even the high profile podcasters like Tim Ferris seem to have the same guests as everyone else.
I work in the podcast industry. Anchor made it easy and free for people to start podcasting, so tons of people tried it during lockdowns. But podcasts are a lot of work beyond just having a place to host: from recording, finding guests, editing, marketing, etc. So you have a lot of beginners who drop off.
One useful thing about the incredible number of podcasts that I've only recently discovered is that you can often find in depth interviews with relatively obscure people or about niche subjects which contain a ton of information that's hard to come by other places.<p>For instance, a couple weeks ago I was listening to an 20+ year old album I've always loved that doesn't get much attention. I searched in Spotify and sure enough I found a podcast that was doing a multi-hour series just on that album and broke down its history, production, etc.<p>Another example is that yesterday I was out training for a race I'm running in a couple months and managed to find multiple interviews with the race director, past winners, etc. to put me in a great mindset for a tough day training.
If podcasts are like blogs, they will need a crazy amount of time and energy to get off the ground and that’s why we don’t see so many blogs any more. Discoverability is too hard for most individuals to even try for now
This seems predictable, though, no? I sorta figured that it'd go like blogging, and here we are.<p>What surprises me is how many podcasts are INSANELY long -- like, 2+ hours. Where do people find the time to listen?<p>(Granted, I say this as someone with a zero podcast diet. I'm not opposed to them or anything; I just don't have a place in my life for listening to them. I have no commute. I prefer music when cooking or cleaning or whatnot. My exercise is usually biking, and I don't listen to anything for that.)
Oh, 99% of podcasts are just terrible. A fav show of mine started quite good, but now... 3+ hour interviews? Why? Because the interviewer just sits there like a sloth and listens to whatever the other party has to say, never interrupting. And from a 3 hour interview there is only (at best) 15 minutes of relevant information, the rest is filler. Even TED talks lately became terrible, I have nothing to tell or I tell you this basic thing packaged as some earth shattering insight in 10 minutes videos, like relevant information is somehow suppressed and just the nothingspeak stays.<p>good curated content is needed, but goog's search is just plain terrible in this regard. seo optimized pages everywhere with useless recommendations.<p>Sometimes I find a lot of shows with great content in some forgotten part of the Internet, but these cease to exist after a few episodes... maybe because they saw the initial numbers. and these good people will never come back to create more content, only the brave idiots stay in the arena :(.<p>Common problems:<p>- zero editing (respect your audience by cutting the slack and interrupt your interview subject if the discussions veers towards personal things). at least timecode topics in the description. the subject's personal life is only interesting if the person is well known, in the mainstream, or a good story teller, but most of them just like to talk and talk and talk. the interviewer's job is to interrupt the person and make him/her stfu and bring forth another, interesting subject.<p>- interviewer sometimes is just an idiot, and just regurgitates what the other party has said with different words... mind boggling<p>- interviewer can't ask proper questions, hard questions. the subject just sits there, like he paid for 3 hours of time and talks about offtopic things.<p>- good shows drown after a few years or become routine for the creators. There is a podcast about security... it was also quite good in the beginning, but lately it's now all about all kinds of political shenanigans, geopolitics and the like. To be honest it's dead boring, the hell do I care about these high level shit stirring things? I want to hear some insights, expert opinions about the topic.
I think podcasting is at its best when it's niche, weirdo content made by nobodies. I mainly listen to comedy podcasts, and the best ones aren't established celebrities barging into the space. See: Conan O'Brien, who I like quite a bit, but I was annoyed when he announced his show. They take up a lot of oxygen and discoverability is worse because of it. On the other hand, they probably roll up a lot of people who wouldn't be listening to a podcast at all otherwise, so it's not like they're sucking up audiences, but there's only so much room for promotion and ranking.<p>There's also a pool of topics which everyone has an opinion on that are saturated and you really have to have an interesting angle to stand out.
Podcasts have become professionalised IMHO as well.<p>With the likes of the BBC creating tons of them which are written and recorded by professional journalists, the quality is pretty high and I can see these capturing the market from the amateur "I just recorded some crazy stuff and threw it out there" sector.<p>It's also very different from the podcasts I think other posters are talking about, which have a host and guests, all of whom bloviate about whatever the topic of the day might be. That's just like an old-school radio show and not really very interesting to me.
In 2018 I was subscribed to like 20+ podcasts. Most of these were either tech news or "popular" podcasts. Lots of once or twice a week in that group and it really felt like a chore to keep up with them. I also felt that there was dwindling actual information or entertainment that I was getting out of them so by 2019 I had already unsubscribed from about 1/3rd of them. The pandemic hit and I no longer had a 30-45 minute commute so I stopped listening to most of my podcasts. I unsubscribed to the rest and only listen to 2 regularly (while running) and have a few others that I listen to if the topic/guest is intriguing. All of this is to say that most podcasts seem to exist in an effort to make podcasts rather than having anything worthwhile or entertaining to say. Also, none of the podcasts I am still subscribed to are tech related.
The market demand is satisfied by like ~250 podcasts the same way that there are about that many TV shows or fewer. The difference is that unlike TV shows, which cost a lot to make, amateur podcasts are very cheap to produce so there are a lot of people just doing it not because it's profitable but because they had nothing better to do during the pandemic. Now that we're past that phase people are over making new podcasts.
There was definitely a fad over the pandemic of people hosting their own podcasts. Multiple people I know started doing it. Super nice people, but they didn’t offer particularly insightful opinions or have great guests. It seemed like a fun thing for a group of friends to do, but I’m not surprised that podcast creation is slowing down.
Here's my experience with podcasts, as a mild-moderate user, and it may explain part of the drop off.<p>The first time I tried podcasts I listened to ones about my work (internal medicine, hospital based physician), I started with a few. Some were outgrowths of already established medical journals and they were very formal, posted rarely, and usually had bad audio quality but pretty good density of information. Then I found The Curbsiders, which was a much more down to earth podcasts of guys that sounded like they worked with me. More laid back but still informational. But over time they got successful and started having commercial backing and then that legal rapid voice-over and the honeymoon was over, it wasn't something that was "average joe" like me anymore, it was establishment and I stopped enjoying it and would rather just read medical literature or journal blogs because it's similar.<p>Around the same time I also started listening to podcasts about spaceflight. The first one I listened to regularly got put aside when my wife couldn't stand the hosts. After listening to her reasoning, I was respected that it was not something that she enjoyed listening to because the hosts really turned her off by being stereotypical white male nerds that would interrupt guests to show off their knowledge and really gave off mansplaining vibes.<p>That led me to look at other podcasts and then I found one (and by extension a set of three) that I really enjoyed them to the point where I decided to support it on Patreon. When I supported it, I found out there was a side benefit of joining a "members only" Discord. I didn't intend to use it and had never used Discord before but it happened right when COVID hit so I gave it whirl. That discord became a fun distraction and place to talk socialize online (probably amplified by the COVID isolation situation everyone went through). Now, I usually get spaceflight news from people there, and if I listen to the podcast it is behind the news, so I don't tend to listen to it as much.<p>In summary for me: One successful podcast became big and something I didn't want anymore. Some were just not good quality and found better ones out there. And some are good and still going but the evolution in social media disrupted and replaced the podcast.
Wow. It's just staggering.<p>From the article :<p>219,178 new podcasts were created in 2022 as opposed to 337,063 in 2019.<p>2022 saw the publication of 26.1 million new episodes, up from 18.1 million in 2019. Yet, those numbers fare poorly compared to 2020 and 2021 figures (30,130,431 and 29,513,070 respectively).<p>Even if it's declined it is a mind bogglingly large number of new podcasts.<p>It's like book publishing but arguably even easier. Who knows, perhaps 100K new podcasts per year is enough....
What's happening to podcasts now previously happened to the WWW.<p>In the 1.0 era, websites were hand-crafted and made for no other reason than curiosity and time. Then businesses got into the game, and personal websites disappeared. Today, unless you are a developer or have something to sell, chances are that you wouldn't even think of creating a website.<p>It seems that podcasts followed the exact same path. As late as 2012, podcasts were niche things that most had heard about, but few actually considered doing. Today, like websites, podcasts are just another arm of marketing at best, or an ad delivery vector at worst.
I don't listen to podcasts at all but oddly enough, I just came across the Hermitix[1] podcast today and found myself listening to it most of the day.<p>> Hermitix is a podcast focusing on one-on-one interviews relating to fringe philosophy, obscure theory, weird lit, underappreciated thinkers and movements, and that which historically finds itself 'outside' the academic canon.<p>1. <a href="https://anchor.fm/hermitix/" rel="nofollow">https://anchor.fm/hermitix/</a>
Interestingly enough, the source for this post talks only about the number of podcasts, not the number of creators.<p>I'm not sure if we should be worried. 2020 and 2021 seem like outliers. While the number of new podcasts is below 2019 levels (roughly at 2018), there's still plenty of new <i>episodes</i>. Still below 2020/2021 but above 2019, so I think nothing bad is happening
I listen to two types of podcasts - short form news (under 20 minutes) and long-form educational/interesting (over an hour). Discovery is a big problem with podcasts - and when I do end up finding something, if I can't click with something in the first 10 minutes, I end up turning it off. I only listen to perhaps 6-7 different podcast creators.
One question not asked is: how many podcasts can there be? If regular years recently have seen ~250K new podcasts, and 2020 saw a million, that means that there might be as many as 5 million podcasts created throughout history.<p>Do that many people have that much to say?<p>Or looking at it from the other side: are there that many people who listen to podcasts? If you take 500 listeners as a bound of "podcasts with such low listenership that they are at risk of ending" and suppose that the average person listens to 5 podcasts regularly, then you need 100 million podcast listeners just to sustain 1 million podcasts. Again, are <i>that</i> many people listening?<p>Slicing it yet another way, if the average podcast lasts for 3 years, then at present rates that means there are ~600K active podcasts at any one time.<p>There should obviously be a flow of old podcasts ending and new ones springing up to take their place. But it seems unlikely that 600K individual podcasts is sustainable.
I found myself listening to podcasts _way_ more during the pandemic (multiple hours per day), as a coping mechanism. I'd just walk for hours and listen to something. My podcast consumption's definitely dramatically down with a return to some sort of normality.
A lot of creative outlets are faddish for production, even if they remain commercially viable. For a while podcasting was having a moment, with big names like Serial making a splash.<p>Now TikTok and short form videos are having their moment. Something else will come again.
Considering what happened in 2020, I'll submit that a comparison of 2020 and 2022 doesn't necessarily tell us much about podcasting, per se. At least show me 2019, too, and <i>then</i> we can start hypothesizing.
YouTube made two important changes to their algorithm over the past decade:<p>- Newer content listed over "best fit" content.
- Time of viewing prioritizing longer videos over shorter ones.<p>Both these were done for advertising purposes. Both result in more drawn out, less dense content (both from an information and entertainment perspective). This is the result of the ad driven model. People would rather waste time than buy things. Want quality content in audio format that doesn't waste your time? Buy an audiobook. You get what you pay for.
It's impossible to keep up the pace. Not because people can't create them but because most can't find an audience. If you create one you want a sizeable audience. That's not possible if the number falls in the millions. My bet is that a few hundred, if that, will eventually be successful enough to create a viable business. Most others will be hobbies but there won't be 100's of thousand of them. We've hit peak podcast numbers.
It's wonderful that anyone can create a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, etc.<p>At the same time, the math means that at some point you'll have so many creators that it's hard to get the attention of an audience. And a lot of the folks who created some kind of content channel because someone promised that it would be an easy way to make a lot of money then realized that they bought a shovel that they really don't want to use to dig.
I don't think that this is a bad thing. There were way too many people putting out podcasts in 2020-2022 who obviously didn't have any interest in the medium. I mainly worry that a contracting field might hurt revenues for established podcasters.<p>As a side note, I've found it harder and harder to find good podcasts. A select few seem to be able to game the metrics so they end up at the top of whatever lists I used to use to discover new content.
Podcasts face similar problems as any other digital content creation mode in this brave new world: discovery and funding on the one hand (to support creators) and information overload on the other (complicating the attraction of steady populations of listeners)<p>In a sense they are the perfect enhancement to the radio of yesteryear which served people reasonably well and was loved for many, many, decades.<p>But the good guys don't always win.
Looking at the dates I suspect a bunch of people started making podcasts because they suddenly had spare time from activities they couldn't do due to the covid pandemic (ongoing but less restrictions) and were looking for ways to connect to people.<p>Personally I think good podcasts are more like zines than radio programs. Poorly slapped together, maybe short lived, but often containing something unique and special.
I think for a while a lot of podcasts sort of got started because there was a low barrier to entry. Most of those podcasts are kinda vacuous though. Not that there aren't the odd gems, but a huge proportion of small podcasts consists of just 2-3 people gossiping for 45 minutes, usually reinforcing the same general ideas over and over without really thinking them through.
--too much competition. How many more productivity podcasts, nutrition, or fitness podcasts does the world need?<p>--too much expenses such as production, audio, set-up, etc.<p>--hard to get good guests unless you are part of the clique/network , although I don't think this matters too much. It's not like you need top gusts to have a good podcast.
Some good history-related podcasts that I recommend:<p>History of Rome<p>Revolutions<p>History of Japan<p>And the podcast-like YouTube video series “Computer History Museum Oral Histories”.
Like the app store, we had a gold rush but it quickly became oversaturated and dominated by few players. It's also very hard to get discovered. Only way to get to top 10 is to spend a lot on marketing. I don't know people who build new apps anymore as a result
I am a voracious podcast consumer, probably listening to an average of 5 hours per day. Over the last 2-3 months, however, I've noticed my interest in podcasts rapidly decreasing.<p>Now that the election is over and Trump is fading I guess I've lost interest in the political stuff. Also, I think I'm realizing how useless it is to my life to just hear about politics.<p>As for people being outraged for or against the woke stuff, it is just the same talking points being rehashed over and over, so I'm tuning that out as well.<p>I've also noticed that when someone has something interesting to say, such as Richard Reeves recently, then that person appears on all the podcasts in my feed, so it becomes a bit repetitive for me.<p>Even podcasts related to the carnivore diet, which I follow closely, have basically beaten the subject to death over the last 2-3 years. I know the diet works and I've been convinced from every angle and there just isn't much more to say beyond that.<p>The only podcast that I really look forward to anymore is The Rest is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. They have a great rapport and the historical episodes they recount are fascinating. It is the only podcast I would recommend to almost anyone.
I don't really like the time I spend listening to podcasts. My dad, though, had talk radio playing constantly. Part of me thinks I have a genetic proclivity for listening to inane chatter. It is comforting.
I just started releasing episodes I recorded the past 3 months. I am excited to finally get some personal interests out there for the world to enjoy! ListenNotes microfeed tool was slick to setup and use to publish. I've had a lot of fun learning everything it takes to make a show.<p>Of particular interest to this crowd E1 with Ange Yaghi & Engine Simulator just released last Wednesday and we talk about it going viral along with some of the technical details.<p><a href="https://leetrout.com/fishtales/e1/" rel="nofollow">https://leetrout.com/fishtales/e1/</a> and links to the show's pages on the popular platforms is on the parent of that page.
Most podcasts I listen to these days consist of someone interviewing someone interesting. Since the supply of interesting people is limited, Pareto distributions start to dominate.
I do not understand people who have the time to create these, nor people who have the time to listen to these, nor people who believe people should take the time to listen to these, where "these" is informational audio or video content on any single topic exceeding 15 minutes in length.<p>Toss in the people who think they need 2 minutes of intro, or spend 30% or more of their time greeting/acknowledging/whatever people who aren't present/involved when the audience actually consumes the content, and I just don't know why these things ever became so widespread.<p>That's my mileage, anyway.
There may be fewer, but there are still people making new podcasts, though! I really like this one weird local podcast called Bay Area Weekend, for example.
YouTube has better analysis support, profits from ads and premium, recommendation, and far more big user base. So it looks natural that people just post YouTube videos. A cons is that background playback needs Premium.