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The Audacity to Podcast® - tips and how to start and grow profit in podcasting
424. A New Way to See Podcast Industry Insights!
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Here's a new and improved way to see podcast industry insights. Thank you for joining me for the Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis. I've been tracking metrics on the podcast industry since 2018, and there's an interesting story behind that. For many years my podcast reviews had been running. Yes, this is totally relevant. Mypodcastreviews.com turned into podgagement. But for many years that was developed for me by someone else in a programming language that has been dying. Ruby on Rails and a language that I just did not want to learn. But I really wanted to rebuild my podcast reviews into something much better. And I'd been planning that for multiple years. And in 2018 I decided to get serious about that and start rebuilding it myself. But that meant I needed to learn how to code because I didn't know how to code before then. I knew HTML and CSS as a web designer, so I was a front end developer in that sense of just the HTML and CSS. But I didn't know JavaScript. I knew backend php just enough to make a WordPress plugin Social subscribe and follow icons, or for short, subscribe and follow. And that was about it. So when I decided to rebuild my podcast reviews, I wanted to learn a programming language. I studied what the options were and decided I wanted to learn JavaScript. Because with JavaScript you can learn backend code running Node J s and you can use front end JavaScript like with React and next JS. And so JavaScript can help run an entire site, an entire ecosystem of code to make a website or an app work. And so I started studying JavaScript and Node JS and I took a few courses on that to thoroughly learn it. And the first thing I built was going to be the back end engine for powering the new my podcast reviews. But that was 2018. And while I was building that engine and having it running, I started discovering some interesting insights like how many podcasts are actually in Apple Podcasts, or how one podcast has some crossover audience with another podcast and their incoming and outgoing networking, as I now call it, inside of Podgagement. So I built this engine to then start collecting all of this information, saving it to a database as well as I started tracking the charts at some point shortly after that. And my thought was this was going to be the foundation for the new my podcast reviews. And so I started presenting some of this really cool Data on the mypodcastreviews.com website, especially like when Apple Podcasts hit 1 million podcasts inside of the Apple podcast catalog. I was sharing that out some press releases and had some fun with predictions on when that might be. And that was all through the my podcast reviews brand. But that was around the time I started realizing that my podcast reviews had a branding problem. Because if someone wanted to cite the statistics that I was sharing, they might say, according to my podcast reviews, There are nearly 1 million podcasts in Apple podcasts. Now think about that grammatically without any proper nouns in there. Are you saying your podcast reviews told you there are nearly a million podcasts in Apple podcasts? How do your podcast reviews tell you that? You see the problem there by having that my in there. And even it being branded to podcast reviews was a problem. It just didn't connect. So that's when I decided back then I need to rebrand my podcast reviews when I launch this new site and rebuild it completely from scratch. But also I wanted to share this data. And I was starting to realize that this data is pretty cool what I'm able to track here. And people were starting to quote from the statistics that I was sharing and asking me questions for further insight into some of the statistics. So I decided I want to spin this out onto its own website so it's no longer data sitting on top of my podcast reviews, but it is its own thing. And thus podcastindustryinsights.com was born. Now, that code that I built in 2018 nearly eight years ago has been running ever since then, until just recently. That poorly written legacy code has lasted for nearly eight years. It's broken down here and there a few times. And the website too has been powered by WordPress, using a charting plugin to display the charts. And that's had its own complications. Like some of the caching would get really weird sometimes where most of the charts would refresh, but not one of them. And I couldn't figure out what is caching this. I would clear all the caches everywhere and just nothing seemed to do it. And then just magically it would start working. And some of that stuff frustrated me and maybe that frustrated too. If you ever checked out the website and noticed that certain charts seemed to be outdated, that was because of some weird caching thing and managing the WordPress side of it. As much as I love WordPress, it was slow as soon as I logged in. If you were logged out, you would get the cached version of the page and it would load fairly quickly. But being logged in, it was extremely slow and extremely complicated to work with for several years. I'VE been tracking much deeper data about the activity Inside of the 110 genres or categories inside Apple Podcasts. And I wanted to display those on my podcast reviews or then later podcast industry insights. But I didn't want to make 110 different pages on WordPress and on top of that multiplied 110 times how many charts I wanted to make. That's how many charts. I'd have to have hundreds of charts. It's not like I could just have a single chart and swap out its data dynamically, at least on that WordPress side, because that's not how it was built. The plugin and WordPress weren't designed for that style of just swapping out the data, but keeping the page. So I just decided I can't display this data. I'll just have to wait until someday in the future when maybe I have time to do it, or maybe I can systemize it in some other way. And that's finally come about. Because when I did eventually finish rebuilding my podcast reviews into podgagement years later, then I still had this legacy code doing all of this cool stuff, collecting new interesting insights, like the incoming and outgoing networking section of Pod Gagement, where you can see what podcasts are linked out from yours from inside Apple Podcasts, as well as of all of the millions of other podcasts out there in Apple Podcasts. Which of them are linking back to yours through their crossover audience in that algorithm? I track that and I think I'm the only one who's been tracking that on such a wide scale like that. And I use that data now inside of podgagement, which is the replacement for my podcast reviews. And that's been really cool, and that's been running on this very old legacy code. But I really wanted to update that code because it's slow, it was poorly written, it was sloppy, and there were a lot of places where it just wasn't efficient. And so it was getting expensive to run it. So I finally decided recently to rebuild the backend of that and the whole engine behind that that was powering that, collecting that information, saving it to the database and how all of that is stored. I also then wanted to take the opportunity to update the front end what you see on podcastindustryinsights.com and I am thrilled with the new podcast industryinsights.com that is now available to you and it is completely free. I used to sell access to an API to get some of the information, or you had to pay in order to see some historic data. Like how many podcasts there were a year ago or so. Now it's all completely free. There's not a paywall, there's not even an email wall or opt in wall, what do they call that, where you have to enter your email address in order to see the information. And the site isn't littered with advertising either. I have one ad banner section on each of the statistics page and for now that's just advertising my own stuff. It's advertising podgagement, pod chapters and the audacity to podcast. There is the opportunity for someone else to sponsor that particular page if they want to. But I don't really intend for this to be a money making thing anymore. It's kind of like the byproduct of an engine that's powering features inside of pygagement. And so I'll just make these statistics available for free to podcasters like you who want to see how's the industry doing, how many podcasts are still active, how many are in a particular genre and such. It's also really useful for podcasting professionals like producers or agencies and networks and such. And it's extremely helpful for anyone who wants to keep an eye on the growth of the podcast industry, like journalists. So go to podcastindustryinsights.com to check it out yourself. But I want to walk you through some of the existing and new features that I'm excited about. First thing is, and you've been able to do this for a long time, is track the total number of podcasts in Apple, Podcasts, Podcast index and even YouTube. More on YouTube in a moment. You've been able to see this for a while. You could Visit the website podcastindustryinsights.com, click on Apple or Podcast Index and you would be able to see how many podcasts there are, as well as some historical information. Well, I've expanded that historical information so now you can see years back into the past, not just the 13 months that it was before. And it was 13 months so that you could see the current month a year ago, as well as see the current month as it's building out. But now you can see as far back as seven years at the time of this recording. So you can see how the industry has grown over the years and you'll discover some interesting patterns from that. Like for example, it seemed like the industry's growth rate suddenly slowed in summer of 2021, and some people around that time started reporting things on. Oh no, the podcast industry is slowing down because There aren't as many new podcasts launching as there used to be before. And on the surface, that's kind of correct, but it's not telling the full story because this had nothing to do with COVID lockdowns. It had everything to do with Anchor, now called Spotify for creators. Because it was in summer of 2020 that anchor stopped auto publishing their pollution of podcasts to Apple Podcasts. So. So no longer was it just, hey, is this thing on getting published as a podcast? I think in some cases, maybe accidentally or unintentionally. Now it is an intentional opt in that the users have to do, and I think that's the way it should be. People should have to opt in to say, yes, I want my podcast out there in Apple Podcasts and all of the podcast apps that are populated from the Apple podcast catalog. I think that should be an intentional opt in, not an automatic thing. So before that, Anker was just polluting with millions of what I call pod flashes out there where it's a flash in the pan, where it's just one episode and nothing. And they stopped doing that in summer of 2021. And that's why the growth rate of the number of podcasts have slowed. But it's still been a consistent growth rate since then. And you can look at that now for years of historical information over at podcastindustryinsights. Com. And a few years ago I started adding Podcast Index to that. And Podcast Index works a little bit differently. I don't necessarily agree with their approach to it, but still, it's interesting insight to share, and that is that they not only track from some of the data that I track for them what's in Apple podcasts, but they also go out and discover podcasts that are out there, which can lead to some unintentional inclusions. And I'd say maybe a lot of unintentional inclusions, but still, it's an interesting number to see, and I've been tracking that over time and you can see how that looks over years. And I even track how many podcasts there are on YouTube. Go over there to podcastindustryinsights.com YouTube. In fact, pause the episode right now and go there. Podcastindustryinsights.com YouTube. I'll wait. Do you see my little joke there? Yeah, yeah. Until YouTube is actually a podcast platform, which it is not, because nothing on YouTube is powered by RSS. You cannot add an RSS feed to YouTube and you cannot follow what's on YouTube through an RSS feed. It is not a podcasting platform and Therefore there are zero podcasts on YouTube and zero podcast episodes on YouTube. I know that is a strong opinion. I am sticking with that opinion for what's a podcast? What's a podcast. Com, by the way? And that's why that's there. I know it's a little bit of a troll, but Also, in case YouTube ever does become an actual podcast platform, then I'll certainly include podcasts on podcastindustryinsights. Com. You can also see how active podcasts are, and I recommend looking at the Podcast index and Apple Podcast pages for this because you can see how active podcasts are for if they've had any activity and that is maybe their first episode or any episode within the last 90 days, as well as other amounts of time like last 30 days, last 10 days, last 60 days, last seven days. And I think that's a very interesting metric to see how many podcasts have published an episode within the last seven days, and it's a much smaller number than you would think. Go over there to podcastindustryinsights.com to see what the number currently is and the small percentage of Apple podcasts that have published an episode within the last seven days. And I track that, and you can track that over time too. And it's really interesting to see that the number, not just the percentage, the number of podcasts that are consistently publishing has decreased a little bit, which I think don't get overwhelmed by that number of millions of podcasts out there, although some of them are timeless. Yes. Focus on that number of how many podcasts published an episode within the last week. That's closer to the kind of competition that you might have. But then you can drill down into even deeper details. But you can also see more information, especially on the Apple podcast page, podcastindustryinsights.com Apple for that you can see more information like how about of all of the podcasts that have one episode in their feed, how many of them are active within the last 90 days versus not active? And you'll see a huge number of podcasts that are inactive that have only one episode in their feed. And guess what? Most of them are from anchor. And that's why it's so good that that pollution fire hose has been turned off from anchor. But you can also see what about podcasts that have 10 or more episodes in the feed? How many of them are still active versus inactive? You can also see the breakdown of how recently is the latest episode from podcasts zero to seven days and so on. And you can get a lot more insight for the overall industry. But and this is brand new and something I've wanted to do for years, you can dig deeper into category details from Apple Podcasts. The reason I couldn't do this before goes back to that whole WordPress front end thing and the charting plugin that I was using, which served me well for many years. But I couldn't make all of the pages for the 110 categories inside of Apple Podcasts. Now I can. Because the new podcast industry, insights.com is built on Next JS. It runs on JavaScript. It's JavaScript all the way down. So I can dynamically change the data on an existing chart. I don't have to create 110 pages. I don't have to create hundreds of charts. I just create a few charts and tell it swap the data. Just look at this record instead of that record of data and it changes fast and it's animated in some cool ways. So you can then see deeper data on specific categories of Apple Podcasts. Not just that overall picture, but of how many podcasts are in each category. But you can see the growth now of how has the sports medicine category grown over the last few years? How many of those podcasts are still active versus inactive? There is a little footnote on the site that there was some kind of weird data calculation issue regarding only the categories for a couple of months and I didn't discover it until just recently. So I unfortunately can't retroactively fix all of that. But I fixed everything that I could there. At least to this point. I haven't figured out a way to retroactively fix some of that data. But you can still look at the trend besides that weird looking spot where you see some odd spikes and things. You can look at the overall trend to see how has this particular category of podcasts grown? Like for a while it was the tennis category that seemed to have the fewest number of podcasts. Now can you take a guess what it is that has the fewest number of podcasts of the 110 podcast categories out there in Apple Podcasts, it's actually mathematics. So if you wanted to have a mathematics podcast, you would be up against no more than 200 other podcasts. I think it's closer to 120 podcasts that have published an episode within the last 90 days that are in the mathematics category. And you can see that information not only just is this their primary category, but how many are in this category at all, even if it's their secondary category. And you can see how many were added to this category, deactivated, reactivated. You can now see that at the category or genre level from Apple Podcasts. And that is really exciting. I've wanted to share that data for years, but just couldn't because of how complicated it would have been to create and manage all of those pages. Now it's so much easier. You can check that out over@podcast industryinsights.com and and just click on that Apple Podcast Categories link there. Or if you're on the Apple Podcast page under the category section, there's a link to look at the individual categories and you can switch your categories and the charts nicely update to show you the information from that category. And it's really cool. Another really cool thing is podcasting 2.0, and I'm deeply involved with podcasting 2.0. I'm a big fan of that. I hope you know that by now. I am an evangelist in many ways for podcasting 2.0. I'm really excited about what's being built inside of podcasting 2.0, and for a little while I've been tracking the feature adoption for that. And I don't think I've mentioned that for a while that you could see that. So if you go to podcastindustryinsights.com and click on Podcasting 2.0, you'll be able to see how these particular features, like the transcripts and chapters and value tag and some of these other features have grown over time and been adopted over time. Some of them track the podcast level and some of them even track at the episode level. Like how many episodes are there out there now with transcripts or chapters, versus how many podcasts have this feature out there that's@podcastindustryinsights.com and the other thing that you might be seeing this data, you might think, this is really cool. I'd love to share this out. Let me try and take a screenshot of this. Or I'd like to get this on a slide or try and copy this into a chart so I can use it in a presentation or display it in a video or share it out on Instagram or X or Facebook or whatever like that. I made that now a whole lot easier for you that there's now a feature next to every chart. There's a button in the upper right corner among the other buttons that let you change from monthly to daily or change the time range that you're looking at like year to date, the last 30 days, or multiple years of history, you can now also, with one click, download an image of that chart. And it will download in 16 by 9 ratio in 4K resolution. And it has a nice heading. If you're looking at the category section, it names the category on the slide, it displays the chart really big. It uses the background color that you're looking at the same way that you would see it. But it's designed for a slide layout and it even has the credit there on the slide, so you don't have to worry about trying to copy and paste that onto the slide. If you want to quote from my stats in a presentation or share that out, it's on there too already for you. So it makes it super convenient for you to go there any day and download the image for any of these charts and share them wherever you want to. And I'd love for you to do that. And you're going to be seeing me do that more often too, now that that's available. That's something I've wanted to do for years also is to make it easier so people wouldn't have to try and screenshot the chart, but you can just download the image. And I mentioned that it uses the background color. Like for Apple Podcast, it's a purple background color. For Podcast index, it's a red background color. For YouTube it's a red background. The new podcast industry, insights.com also supports light mode and dark mode. So if you're in light mode, the images that you download will have a light background color and dark foreground. If you're in dark mode, then the images you download will have that darker branded color background with a light foreground. And I love how that works. This is the third that I do now for any of the new sites and apps that I build. I am always thinking this needs to work in light mode and dark mode. I'm a dark mode person myself. I love everything to be in dark mode. But I know that not everyone prefers dark mode. Some people, I don't know why, prefer light mode and I'm not going to call them names, but you can get that in the images and in the website. So I'd love for you to check out podcastindustryinsights.com yes, this whole episode was a commercial for a free website that I would love for you to use as a resource. You can quote from it, you can download the images, share those images, link to the charts, reference that. As long as you just give me credit, then I provide in there just an example of how that you can give that credit. And it's very simple too. But I'd love for you to share that information out there with others. So go to podcast industryinsights.com. i've said that URL way too many times in this episode. But go to there and download those images, share them, check out the stats, look at the genres and the categories to see what is your actual competition inside your primary podcast genre, whatever that is. See how many of those podcasts are still active. Get more insight this way. And what I really hope is that this will be inspirational to you that if you are podcasting and you're thinking how am I going to stand out among the millions of other podcasts out there? Well, it's actually only a few hundred thousand that have published an episode within the last 90 days. It's an even smaller number who have published an episode within the last seven days and then it's an even smaller number. And this is now so much easier to see of podcasts in your primary category that have published an episode in the last 90 days. That's closer to to how many other podcasts you're competing with. Not millions. Maybe it's a few thousand or a few hundred, or maybe it's even in the tens. Instead, check it out over at podcastindustryinsights. Com. Completely free to use. If you would like to donate, please reach out to me and let me know. There will be a link on the site that you can email to either offer a donation or advertise if you want to on the site. But the resource is free to use and I intend to keep it that way. So check it out podcastindustryinsights. Com Special thanks to Brian Insminer from toptieraudio.com who streamed 1303 total satoshis across my previous several episodes. And thanks to Chad F. Who sent a thousand satoshis and said in response to my previous episode giving a sort of introduction about OpenClaw, he said, I ran OpenClaw for a few weeks but uninstalled it because it burns through tokens way too fast and and I can do what I need with Claude Code and GitHub Actions. That's awesome that you can do that Chad. I'm really glad that you are able to do that. And if you have some things that are working really well for you, especially podcasting related, please share that in an upcoming episode. I want to talk more about what you can do and how you can do things with openclaw, not just saying, oh, you can make a whole team run your podcast for you. Now buy my course. No, I want to actually share the prompts, link to the resources and the skills and such so that if you want to try OpenClaw or a similar kind of agentic AI service that you'll be able to do that. So please send that feedback. If you have any of those, and especially the text of your prompts or commands and such, send that through podcastfeedback.com audacity and I'd love to include that in an upcoming episode, since my episode about openclaw was really just an introduction of some things to think about before you use openclaw. It's not all bad, it doesn't have to be all scary. I want to do an episode soon about what you can do and how you can do it for OpenClaw. So send me that feedback. PodcastFeedback.com Audacity now that I've given you some of the guts, taught you some of the tools, and shown you some of the statistics, it's time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit. It I'm Daniel J. Lewis from the audacitytopodcast.com and creator of podcastindustryinsights.com thanks for listening.