How to Know When to Pull The Plug on Your Podcast

It’s relatively easy to spin up a podcast — it must be, there are 1.4 million of them. Knowing when to throw in the towel is much more challenging.

Interestingly, of the 1.4 million titles, most (55%) have not produced a new episode in the last 90 days, and 27% have not produced an episode in the past year, so clearly, these podcasts have already fallen off. Still, they keep coming. There is a surge in new podcasts aligned with the start of the pandemic. After “finishing Netflix,” for some, the next thing to do was start a podcast. Daniel J Lewis’s excellent data resource Mypodcastreviews tell us some 280,00 podcasts were started in the last 90 days, and you can double that looking to the start of the pandemic.

Podcasts fade for a variety of reasons. Many are started on a whim; some creators hope for instant stardom and riches, ending up disillusioned when finding few listeners. Others quickly learn that creating good durable content is hard and time-consuming.

Tastes Change, Story Arcs Get Old, And New Shows Come Along That Are More Appealing.

The reasons for sunsetting a podcast vary. This post is not about the podcasters that jump in and then out like joining a health club and never showing up. It’s about podcasts that have creatively or empirically run out of gas.