Here’s to the next million podcasts…

For some reason, there is a website that counts how many valid podcast feeds there are on Apple Podcasts. It broadcasts that number via an ever increasing ticker (think that scene in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg realises the hollowness of reaching a million Facebook users) which last Saturday crept past a million for the first time ever.

It’s been coming. I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that the number is flirtatiously near a million but until now people like myself — who are paranoid that there may simply be too many podcasts — haven’t been able to drop jaws in presentations by announcing that there are “more than a million podcasts”. Lucky us: now we can.

The number is amazing. This is a number for feeds, not episodes, and Podnews reported that 46% of those feeds have released an episode in the past 90 days, which is the metric used for deeming them ‘active’. It’s also an amazing thing to be able to quantify — try Googling “how many TV shows in history” or even “how many books have ever been published” to witness the difficulties that other media have with arriving at a figure. But podcasting can now say that there are at least a million podcasts out there to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The reason we can be fairly confident that the figure is neither wildly under or overplaying the situation is that the…