Podcasting in 2020: the audit

Another year with Spotify making the running

Oh God, I’ve been a professional podcaster for another year. I thought this was just a phase…

Well, that was a nice easy year. No drama, just steady consolidation for our growing industry. Bit of a snooze, actually. But for the hell of it, here’s a quick look at the big stories in podcasting from 2020 and some overall impressions of the health and vitality of our nascent industry.

Towards the start of the year — when the great clock that counts podcast feeds finally hit a million — I published a piece here on Pod Culture about what the next million podcasts might look like. And at the end of that piece I made six generalised predictions:

1. English-language will become less market dominant.
2. Average length of an episode will come down.
3. We’ll see the percentage of professional podcasts decline.
4. Local podcasts will increase.
5. More podcasts will stream first.
6. Most of the next million podcasts will have almost no-one listening to them.

Now, if I were giving my predictions (and how they’ve unfurled over the first 9 months since I made them) a score grade, I’d probably say B+. Some undoubtedly reflect currents that we’re seeing: non-English podcasts are taking more of a market share, episode lengths…