Podcast Numbers and Growth
One of my burning questions is how many podcasts are out there, and how is that number changing on a month-to-month basis? Over the next month or so, I want to put a system in place to maintain an up-to-date estimate of this number.
We are in the process of building a set of services to give newcomers easier access to the massive pool of podcast content (keep reading for actual numbers). To make a scalable service, we need a reasonable estimate of the size of the data set. Running an algorithm for 100 podcasts is one thing, but running that algorithm for 100,000 or more takes some careful technical planning.
I surveyed some of the larger podcast hosts and repositories, and as of May 8, 2008:
- feedburner hosts 216,512 podcasts feeds.
- podcast.com claims to have over 60,000 podcasts indexed.
- podcastpickle.com has over 9000 podcasts (319662 episodes)
- dailysplice.com has over 1100 podcasts (70000 episodes)
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the numbers for libsyn, one of the most prominent podcast hosts on the net. About 30% of DailySplice’s indexed feeds come from feedburner, indicating that the number of podcast feeds out there is approaching 700,000.
The other question I have is what proportion of those are regularly updated. Of DailySplice’s feeds, over 1000 ( 90%) have released an episode within the last 3 months. However, we have a relatively new directory, so many of the podcasts in there are popular and/or recently created. I’ll revisit this question once we’ve indexed more legacy content.
If anyone has more accurate estimates, I’d love to hear them! Stay tuned for updates to this topic.
