This may or may not come as a surprise but 2022 was not a good year for new podcast launches. According to data compiled by Chartr from Listen Notes, last year saw fewer new podcasts being released than in 2021, 2020, and 2019.

The stats mean that the number of new shows created between 2020 and 2022 dropped by close to 80%. Last year, 219,178 podcasts were launched, while 1,019,272 new podcasts landed in 2020, which was a huge podcasting year due to the pandemic and its associated global lockdowns. The year before that, in 2019, 337,063 podcasts were started.

Despite fewer podcasts being launched last year compared to years previous, there were still a considerable amount of podcast episodes released to the ether; 26,129,975 of them to be exact. While lower than in 2020, when over 30 million podcast episodes dropped, it is significantly higher than 2019’s figure of 18,147,074 episodes.

According to Listen Notes, there are at least 3 million different podcasts and over 154 million episodes in the world. The US is home to the majority of them: close to 2 million podcasts herald from the States. Brazil, the second biggest producer of podcasts, has 196,277 of them.

Most podcasts, 1.8 million of them, are in English, while 350,752 are in Spanish, and the data also showed that the most popular podcast genres are Society & Culture, Education, and Arts.

Ariel Shapiro from The Verge speculates that the lack of new podcast creation in 2022 is down to combined high production and marketing costs that make launching a podcast a potentially financially disastrous route to go down.

With so many podcasts already on offer, it also makes it harder for new podcasts to be discovered and gain a solid following. That said, as fewer new podcasts are launched, the marketplace is gradually getting less crowded.

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