Podcast numbers
I’m revisiting the issue of podcast numbers out there, because this is an important factor in our service and its implications.
Feedburner reports that it currently serves 230,000 audio and video podcasts. That’s a sizeable number already, but what percentage of total podcasts do they host?
A couple weeks ago, I wrote that DailySplice’s directory has about 1000 podcasts (a fairly small directory so far, but growing steadily.) Feedburner hosts about 33% of those, indicating that there could be over 650,000 podcasts out there.
We’ve since acquired a list of 33,000 podcasts from various hosts. By hosts, I mean the server that provides the RSS file, not the media files themselves (although that’s an interesting issue as well.) The largest RSS hosts are:
- Blogtalkradio, which hosts about 16%;
- Feedburner, which hosts about 10%;
- Libsyn, which hosts about 7%
These numbers are quite a departure to what I’ve seen in the DailySplice directory; I didn’t expect Feedburner’s contribution to be as low as 10%. This list contains only 1% of Feedburner’s total hosted feeds. The numbers for blogtalkradio seem to be in the same ballpark: only about 6% of blogtalkradio’s 87,000 shows are in this list. If the percentage of listed podcasts are the same for other hosts, this could indicate that there are between 550,000 and 3.3 million podcast feeds out there. The latter number seems outlandish, so I intend to do some more verification when more data is available. I’ll also take a look at how many of these are actively producing new content, which will be a more convincing measurement of podcast growth.
Tags: blogtalkradio, feedburner, growth, podcast hosting, podcasts
