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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 company you keep when you cross five hundred episodes.

Joe Rogan, who started in two thousand and nine, sits north of twenty-two hundred episodes. The Daily, the New York Times show, has fifteen hundred plus, and they run a daily cadence. Stuff You Should Know, started in two thousand and eight, sits past eighteen hundred. This American Life, on the air since nineteen ninety-five, is past eight hundred and fifty.

Then the smaller ones. Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, around two hundred and fifty. SmartLess, around two hundred and fifty. Crime Junkie, around four hundred.

I'm past all three of those. Past Conan. Past SmartLess. Past Crime Junkie. I'm well into the territory of shows that have been grinding for a decade or more.

I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because it is the answer to the question. Five hundred and sixty episodes puts a podcaster in roughly the top one-tenth of one percent of all podcasts ever launched, measured by the one metric that actually requires showing up — episode count.

Most "top one percent" lists rank by downloads. Anybody can buy their way onto a download leaderboard with one viral guest or a hundred grand in promotion. By durability — by actually being here every week for years — the room is much, much smaller. And most of the people in it are too busy working to brag about it.

PART TWO — THE LISTENER NUMBERS

Let's say you do beat the cliff. Let's say you publish your fortieth episode, your hundredth, your five hundredth. How many people are actually listening?

For this part, I'm leaning on Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is one of the largest podcast hosts in the world. They're certified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab — meaning their download numbers are honest, not the inflated raw-hit nonsense that everybody else uses. They publish their statistics live on their website. They host more than a hundred and fifteen thousand active podcasts.

Here is the median number of downloads a new podcast episode gets in its first seven days on Buzzsprout.

Twenty-nine.

I want you to hear that one more time. Twenty-nine downloads. That is the fifty-percent line. Half of all podcasts on the biggest indie host in the world get fewer than twenty-nine downloads in seven days.

If you get one hundred and two downloads in seven days, you are in the top twenty-five percent.

If you get four hundred and seventeen, you are in the top ten percent.

If you get one thousand and twenty-three, you are in the top five percent.

If you get four thousand seven hundred and forty downloads in seven days, you are in the top one percent of all podcasts.

Joe Rogan, by comparison, runs around eleven million downloads per episode. The math gap between the median podcaster and Rogan is roughly the gap between a garden hose and the Pacific Ocean. So when somebody tells me they want to be the next Joe Rogan, I just nod politely and think about lunch.

Now, the demand side is actually healthy. Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2025 report came out this past March. Forty percent of Americans twelve and older listened to a podcast in the past week. Record high. Fifty-five percent listen monthly. Roughly one hundred and fifty-eight million Americans are listening to something every month.

People are listening. Lots of people. The problem is, they are not listening to your show. They are listening to the same fifty shows everybody else is listening to.

PART THREE — THE MONEY

Now let's talk money. Because every person who calls me about starting a podcast eventually gets around to asking — Paul, when does the money show up.

Here's when. Almost never. But let me give you the numbers, because precision matters.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, publishes the most authoritative report on internet adv...