There Are LESS Active Podcasts in July 2023 Than In 2018: What It Means For You

0:00So Neil, if you're to guess before looking at this title, if you would think there would be more active podcasts or less active podcasts in 2018 versus 2023. Again, without looking at this title, what would you say? I would assume that there are more active podcasts in 2023 because overall there's more podcasts. I don't know how many of them are still continuing to produce episodes, but I would just make the assumption that there's more active ones. How many active podcasts do you think there are right now? 200 ,000. Okay, watch. So Neil, the guess is not completely far off. But what I wanted to share was this quote from Danny Miranda.

0:39So he's a podcaster. And it says in 2018, there were 550 ,000 active podcasts on iTunes. I don't know how they score that. But now you look at today, there are currently 493 ,000 active podcasts as of July 2023. So you can see the numbers here. And I think this is interesting. There's less. Dude, 2021 has started to boom. in June 2021. And then it's just been going down since but in May 2023, it went up a little bit to 474 versus 449 in January. Yeah, I mean, so what are your thoughts on this overall? A lot of people are consuming podcasts, but there's not as much competition. If you want a new channel to go after and I've said this before, podcasting is an amazing channel to go after.

1:28I I just don't know why a lot of people don't sit down and create them. I think this is an interesting comment over here. This is my first time seeing this comment. So this person, Matt Johns says, another factor is Apple's total neglect of the category in tech. I've run a podcast agency for seven years and I'm shifting to emphasize video shows that can leverage YouTube. That's where all the innovation, analytics, growth opportunity, and energy are. Which is funny because, Neil, we didn't do our YouTube. I'm going to stop the share over here. But we didn't do our YouTube for years and years. Partly because I lost, the connection fell apart.

1:58and then also I lost the password to the channel, right? And then we recovered it. And now we're back on YouTube. Otherwise, I think we'd be like doing really well on it. And I do agree. Like I was, I don't know if we'll do an episode on this today, but I was looking at our YouTube analytics. I'm like, dude, if we just fix this over here, fix this over here, boom. Like I know we just go up and to the right. Like it's so obvious to me, right? Like there's just stuff, I'm just, why are we doing it this way? But my point is, I think if I were to start from scratch today, I would do a video podcast show and I would have a newsletter.

2:26That's how I'd start. I wouldn't care about the newsletter, but I would definitely do it in video format. And then you can just cut out the video and then you have the audio format. Similar to what we do now. It's a much better approach than going after the audio first version. You know, interestingly enough, Neil, like what I found from podcasting too, and this kind of goes into like our, how we've been doing it. When, when I look at our shorts, we're live and we're telling stories. The retention rate is like 80, 90 % on a short, for example. And when we lead with a good hook on YouTube, it's very obvious.

2:58Lead with a good hook, we keep them for the first 30 seconds, that video will do well. If we just start rambling in the first 30 seconds, the video tanks. If we have a good headline, good thumbnail, all that stuff, it all matters at the end of the day. So the point here, I digress a little bit, but sure, we say there's over 7 million podcasts or whatever, but active podcasts, 493 ,000, it's a very blue ocean. Sure, back in the day, you would say discoverability is hard, but you have a better chance to get discover now because of the short form content. Yeah, because you can take a video version, you can then use the audio version for iTunes and Spotify, I was about to say Shopify, but Spotify, and then you can take the video version again, because you put it out in a whole format for, let's say YouTube, but you can also take the video version, slice and dice it and create things like reels and shorts for them as well.

3:48I think the key thing here is if you actually want to put you're back into doing this. I know it's probably 1 % of people listening, right? Because that's just how numbers work. But if you're going to take action on this, I would say the one thing I hope for our podcast over here is that we have editors that really understand psychology around the right moment to hook. So you pull in the right moment to hook, you understand testing of thumbnails, of titles, and you understand how to evoke curiosity and sometimes even pull out controversy from what we're talking about, right? That's how you're going to get people curious because at the end of the day, we can complain about, Oh, YouTube isn't giving us credit.

4:22We make good videos. No, it's like, if you make a good video, you make a good video and you'll get credit for it. And that's just how it is. So I'm excited to see where this goes. And again, if you're going to hire someone to do it, make sure that they can cover these areas that we talked about. Anything else? Nope. That's it. All right. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Events coming up in the next couple of days, August 7th to the 9th. Neil and I will be hanging out there, other great founders, other great marketers. And yeah, they'll be talking about a lot of great stuff. So leveling up.com slash founders, and we'll see you tomorrow.