Why there aren’t 2M podcasts

This is a long and poorly written article to point out that the 2M podcasts on Apple Podcast follow a power law. 26% of podcasts have only produced one episode, 37% have produced 2 or fewer episodes, 44% have produced 3 or fewer episodes.

Then the article fails to do math for a bit. 44% of podcasts producing 3 or fewer episodes means 56% did 4 or more. So 880k have 3 or fewer, 1.12 M have 4 or more. But the article mixes that up:

> 44% of all podcasts have produced three or fewer episodes.

> If a 'real podcast' is a series of at least four episodes, that effectively reduces the total of two million podcasts to 880,000.

Off topic: "subscribe" popups are annoying enough as they are, but this is the first time one of them asks me to solve a captcha before I'm granted the privilege of receiving their emails.

Honestly, we're lucky there aren't 2M podcasts.

I used to work in radio, and for many years of that part of my job was to listen to all of the resume tapes that potential talk show hosts and documentarians sent in. (A couple of times forcibly, barging past the receptionist and insisting everyone listen to their tape before being escorted out.)

The bottom line is that while almost everyone thinks they have an important story to tell, very few people really do have anything compelling to say. It's important to them, but isn't all that interesting to the rest of the world.

And for those few people in the world with something truly interesting or important to say, even fewer are actually good storytellers. They'd be better off writing their compelling stories for other people to voice, which is what a lot of professional podcasts do.

The internet made it easier for everyone to have an equal voice. But all that did was teach us that not everyone is worth listening to, so we mostly just hear the loudest voices.

That's the strangest way to show a histogram I've ever seen. Sort of cumulative in both directions at the same time.

To summarize,

The article asks the question, Why there really aren’t 2 million podcasts? and goes on to say, 1/4th of all podcasts are out of business, or more likely, were never really in it.

The rest of it is filled with incoherent bullet points? it has been difficult to follow. Honestly, this feels like someone was taking notes on a napkin about an article that they'd wish to write and what's with the author's picture and name in an image? There are better ways to stop scalpers to get an email address.

I don't want to be too harsh here but the data sources, graphs and charts are of poor quality.

I wonder if these percentages hold for other types of "low-barrier to entry" media (e.g. Bandcamp/SoundCloud musicians, YouTube channels)?

everyone is complaining in the comments about this article yet it got to the font page somehow ..hmmm..

I think 700k (or even 400k+ as estimated in these comments) is still huge

Inactive isn't not "real", it's just a slow or aborted attempt. The Podcastindex.org site shows over 400k podcasts updated in the last two months out of a total of 2.5m (they do some de-duplication, discussed in their own podcast).