Episode Details

561
May 22, 2026

  PODCAST EPISODE 561 — THE NUMBERS NOBODY WANTS TO SHOW YOU
By Paul Truesdell

This is episode five hundred and sixty-one. And I'm going to start with that number, because that number is the whole reason I'm doing this episode. The title of Episode 561 is The Numbers Nobody Wants to Show You.

Last time, I wrapped up episode five hundred and sixty. Five-six-zero. And I'll come back to it in a minute, but I want to set the table first.

Last episode I talked about what I've learned over three decades behind microphones. Why I'm not playing the algorithm game anymore. Why I'm not chasing thumbs-ups, view counts, or any of the rest of that digital fool's gold. After that one went out, a few of you asked the same question. So, Paul — where does that actually put you in the mix? What do the real numbers look like?

Fair question. So I went and pulled twenty-four sources for this episode. Edison Research. The Interactive Advertising Bureau. Amplifi Media. Buzzsprout. Pew Research Center. Google's own official YouTube documentation. Academic studies. Trade publications. The full list — every one of them, with links — is in the show notes at PaulTruesdell.com. Go there. Read them yourself. Don't take my word for any of this.

What I'm about to tell you is the truth, with receipts. Settle in.

PART ONE — THE CLIFF

Let me start with the cliff. Because there is a cliff. And almost nobody who starts a podcast gets past it.

Amplifi Media, working with James Cridland over at Podnews, ran the numbers off the Podcast Index database. The Podcast Index lists about four million podcasts. Four million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it.

Here is what they actually found.

Forty-four percent of all podcasts ever launched have published three or fewer episodes. Twenty-six percent published exactly one episode. One. They recorded it, they uploaded it, they probably texted their mother to listen to it, and they were done.

It gets worse. Only thirty-two percent of all podcasts ever reach episode ten. Let me read that again, because the people listening on a walk just missed it. Out of every hundred people who start a podcast, sixty-eight of them never make it to episode ten. They quit before they even know what they're doing.

Now raise the bar one more notch. Active podcast. Meaning ten or more episodes, plus an episode released in the past week. The number who clear that bar is just under four percent. Four percent of every podcast ever launched qualifies as a real, breathing, ongoing show.

A reasonable listener asked the question, Paul — do very few podcasts go beyond forty episodes.

Yes. Very few. By the time you hit forty episodes, you've outlasted essentially everyone who ever stood behind a microphone with a dream and a USB cable. You are in a small room.

Dan Misener at Pacific Content put it nicely. He analyzed millions of podcast feeds and reported the median age of all podcasts is one hundred and seventy-four days. About six months. He called it mosquitoes versus tortoises. Most podcasts are mosquitoes. They show up, they make some noise, and they're gone.

Now. About that five hundred and sixty.

If only thirty-two percent of podcasts reach episode ten, and only four percent reach the active threshold, what happens when you keep going? What happens at one hundred episodes? Two hundred? Five hundred?

The curve doesn't level off. It falls off a cliff. There is no clean public dataset on exactly how many podcasts reach five hundred episodes, because almost nobody does. But every factor-of-ten gate cuts the survivors brutally. Industry pattern data places podcasts with one hundred or more episodes at well under one percent of all shows ever launched. Five hundred or more — somewhere around one-tenth of one percent. Or fewer.

For context, here is the