I'm told there are now over 4.5 million podcasts in existence.
The industry is worth 40 billion dollars, 158 million Americans tune in monthly, and the medium has finally achieved the kind of cultural ubiquity previously reserved for terrestrial radio or the evening news.
But if you actually spend time (literally, any time at all) scrolling through the "New & Noteworthy" or the top-tier recommendations, you'll find that podcasting feels increasingly like a ghost town built out of gold. There's an almost hollowed-out quality to it; we've built a massive infrastructure for human communication, only to realize that we've run out of things to say - or more accurately, that the incentives have shifted such that saying something interesting is now a disadvantage.
In evolutionary biology, a mass extinction event is a clearing of the brush. It removes the over-specialized, the bloated, and the lucky-but-lazy, making room for the small, furry mammals of the creative world to actually do something interesting.
Well, podcasting could do with a good asteroid.
We're living through the aftermath of the 2020-2022 boom: a period where "dumb money" flooded the gates and every celebrity, brand, former-detective and hobbyist with a USB microphone decided they were the next Joe Rogan or Sarah Koenig.
In 2020, we saw the highest growth of new shows in history.
By 2025, the hangover has set in.
Only about 10% of those 4.5 million podcasts are actually active. The rest are "podfaded" relics - three-episode arcs that began with bright-eyed enthusiasm and ended when the creators realized that talking to a void is harder than it looks.
We're left with a top-heavy ecosystem where the giants - the pre-2020 incumbents who already have their audiences baked in - suck up all the oxygen, while the middle class of podcasting has become both bloated and neutered. Shows launched before the Great Pandemic Boom outperform newer shows by an embarrassing margin. Advertisers certainly aren't looking for the next big thing; they're retreating to the safety of the Old Guard.
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