Only a third of Apple’s two million podcasts have more than 10 episodes

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Recent data from Podcast Industry Insights shows that Apple now has over two million original podcasts available on Apple Podcasts. However, further inspection of this data from Amplifi Media shows that almost half of the podcasts listed on the app have less than three episodes, and only a little over a third have more than 10 episodes available.

The data further shows that 26% percent of shows on the platform have only one episode. The amount of podcasts that have four or more episodes is around 900,000, which is a number that maybe represents what is available on the platform a little better.

The breakdown from Amplifi Media suggests that the number of podcasts available on Apple’s platform seems a little inflated, due to the amount of what might be considered “dead-end” content. A good portion of podcasts with only one episode come from mediums where people may still be experimenting with production. Most of these shows are experimental and have no real future on the platform. Amplifi likened this to a television network including failed pilots of TV shows in their list of shows available.

However, the media company also noted that not all programming is intended to continue, noting that a lot of podcast content is designed to be single episode content:

Not all podcasts are meant to be unending series. You can find plenty of great and evergreen content designed to run for just a handful of episodes. That’s part of the beauty of podcasting, but the one-and-done titles unfairly inflate the overall number of podcasts, and it is revealing that 44% have three or fewer episodes.

Though Apple has reached the landmark of 2 million official podcasts on its platform, it definitely looks like that number is inflated quite a bit. With almost half of shows published having less than four episodes available, the amount of enjoyable content is probably much lower.

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