Learning Objectives
- Humble beginning to Boom year
- Diversity & Inclusivity in podcasting
- Where to discover podcasts
- Who is podcasting?
- Trends in podcasting
The milestone celebrated in 2023 signaled that podcasting is mainstream. The first podcast on July 9, 2003 was created by software developer and blogger Dave Winer and journalist Christopher Lyden. Today, podcasts have more listeners than ever, especially among young people, and audiences are spending more time listening, fueled by the growth in smartphones, smart speakers, and in-dash entertainment systems. Growth in diversity saw the number of Black and Hispanic podcast listeners increase over 30% in the last two years in the U.S.
Worldwide the number of podcasts is now considered to be between two to five million. There are differing numbers because they reflect the podcast directory being used. Podcast Index, which is primarily built from discovering open podcast RSS feeds on the web, says there are more than 4.3 million podcasts.
The Apple Podcasts catalog lists 2.6 million podcasts while Spotify says they have 5.5 million podcasts, reported by Podnews.
While those may seem like large numbers and lots of competition for ears and eyes, a huge number of the podcasts created during the pandemic years are no longer in production now that our lives have gotten a bit more normalized. In December 2020 the number of active podcasts – meaning that a new episode has been released in the last 90 days – stood at 59%. By January of 2024 that percentage has dropped to 17.2%, according to figures from The Podcast Host.
Most significantly, more than half of all that listening now happens on YouTube and Spotify combined, with one-third using YouTube followed by a quarter on Spotify, according to a survey by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.
This chapter gives an overview about the state of podcasting, who’s doing it, what researchers have discovered about audiences, and top trends such as the wide availability of AI tools now being used in podcasting for more than just creation of show transcripts.
The start of podcasting began with three people – a former MTV video jock, a software engineer who pioneered blogging and developed the web feed known as RSS, and a former journalist/writer.
In 2001, media personality and entrepreneur Adam Curry, shared an idea in a blog post that led to podcasting. You can now see that post and learn the intriguing story of the first podcast feed, thanks to research by journalist and podcast creator Eric Nuzum.
Curry had met in a New York City hotel room with software engineer/blogger Dave Winer, the pioneer who created the tools that drove blogging and distribution technology. He posted about that meeting, “Adam wants the Internet to be Everyman’s broadcast medium, to route around TV and radio broadcast networks, with no compromise in quality. Now if this were easy, or the solution obvious, we’d already be doing it. But there’s a big sticky problem in the way,