State of Business Podcasting 2021
WHAT THE TOP 100 SHOWS ARE DOING

RESEARCH CONDUCTED AND REPORT PREPARED

Overall, the top 100 business podcasts were about the same age – and like last year, I think it’s great how many of them are newer shows, meaning that you’re in no way “too late” to create a podcast.

In terms of releases on the other hand – we’re seeing more. Daily releases among the top 100 have increased from 9% to 17% (including Monday to Friday release), and three weekly releases went from 7% to 10%. Weekly releases took a little dip from 44% to 38% and every other week releases were halved to 3%.

The takeaway here is that unless your goals are strictly about relationship building or content generation (which are 100% legitimate goals!) you should try to release at least weekly.

That doesn’t mean you need to create a whole full-sized episode every week – it’s completely normal to alternate between show types – 9% of the shows we counted do exactly that this year. You can have solo episodes, mini-episodes, reviews, action tips – content that is easy to batch that can help you boost your schedule without a huge amount of extra work. Something we saw a lot more this year was sporadic releases, that didn’t seem to follow a set pattern. 8% of shows used this release method, which I think indicates they are either producing in-house, or aren’t doing much post-production work, because the workflows involved in podcasting almost necessitate a consistent schedule of some time.

On a more philosophical side – As Tom Fox, the Compliance Evangelist says: “Your podcast is a commitment – you release it when you say you’re going to.” I couldn’t agree more. If you’re worried about being able to stick to a schedule, or maintain an ongoing release schedule, test things out with a season! You can do most of the work in advance of release, and when it’s done you can either take a break, decide you don’t like it, plan another one, or move to ongoing – all without any worry of not keeping your commitments – or podfading.

The length of podcast episodes is exactly the same as last year – the sweet spot seems to be about 44 minutes, although longer and shorter shows are perfectly okay. I think it’s a positive sign that people are still interested in longer-form content – it’s not all about short TikTok videos! (Although they have their place!)

Finally, today let’s look at which day of the week people are releasing episodes. There was a pretty even spread of releases throughout the working week, with the middle of the week getting more popular. It’s hard to determine a true change because of how many more releases we are looking at, but this year, Monday took the very top spot.

Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118

E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com

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