Podcasting is doing fine; thank you

If you are reading the headlines about podcasting, you might be a little nervous. There has been a lot of confusing and contradictory chatter about what the drop in new podcasts in 2022 means. Has the podcast bubble burst? Are podcasts on the way out?

Not likely.

Automatically conflating podcasting’s rise and drop of new titles as the arc for the entire business is a false signal and inaccurate. We have the data to prove it.

Lots of anomalies happened during the pandemic
Let’s set the stage. For many, podcasting was a ‘new new’ thing during the pandemic. Podcast creation rocketed up 70% between 2019 and 2020. The barriers to making a podcast were reduced to recording and posting for free directly from smartphones. Millions of people stuck at home tried their hand at creating and publishing content. Most of these “pandemic-casts” stopped after just a handful of episodes.

Pandemic weirdness affected many business categories. Airfryer sales shot up 60%. Views of cooking videos on YouTube more than doubled. Sourdough, by the way, was a big winner.

Sales of used cars spiked, and now post-pandemic sales are off. You see empty Carvana towers.

Streaming video services like Netflix soared with more than five years of expected growth in…