You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple.

The first time I ever heard a podcast was in 2012.

Now, I actually never forget it.

I was in the aerospace industry at that point.

I was a senior executive, and I like to be a person of the people.

What I mean by that is I like to go through my different divisions and apartments and talk to everybody, meet everybody, and make sure I just knew who was working to help the culture of it out, right? And so the one day, I was actually going from my floor of the company down to the warehouse, which is a big open room. Everyone kind of worked in the same area and the inventory was down there, shipping, receiving, all those things, right? So I get into that part of the warehouse and it's a big open space space so i can hear the echo of what i thought was

maybe like a tv show that somebody might have been watching or something like that i really didn't know but i walked through the whole inventory and i get to the back everyone's back there doing stuff and right when i walk back there one's like hey Alex and i'm like hi everybody i flip and turn to see what they're watching on the screen into my shock there's nothing on that screen screen's just blank. And I kind of like point out, I'm like, what do you all, what do you all

listen to? what is this everyone's like oh it's a podcast it's like super good and they started explaining what it was and i was like hold on hold on what's a podcast and they're like oh it's basically like an audio conversation between two people and again go on the ram like hold on hold on that's so lame like no it's not it's amazing and so like we're down they're talking back the ramp. I'm like, hold on, hold on. That's so lame. Like, no, it's not. It's amazing. And so, like, we're down there talking back

and forth. I'm like, this is ridiculous. I'm like, you actually have an app for it on your phone.

I was like, no, I don't. I'm like, yeah, it's the little purple one. And I open up my phone. I'm like, well, what do you know? I do have this podcast thing, huh? I'm like, it's still weird, guys.

Anyway, long story short, I walk out that department, but on my way out, I click into that app

because I heard something back on their computer that had no screen on that seemed interesting to me. I clicked, I typed in the little search. And what do you know? I found something that was actually very interesting to me, the topic. I was like, wow, I actually want to hear this. And about 20 minutes later, I was hooked. I was officially a podcast

listener. And I loved it. I started listening to all kinds of things, started learning and growing from it. And I got really excited about it. And just half a year later, I'd say, I decided to start my first show. I was like, I've listened to a lot of things. I'm going to do it. And I will admit back then it was a little harder, but I'll get into the data in a few minutes here. Things haven't really changed.

But eight weeks after I started this podcast, I did what we call in the biz, pod fade. I had given up. I'd stopped. I went from loving to listen to him deciding, I'm going to start a show to eight weeks later being like, this is too much. I don't want to do it. I can't. I give up. Hey, my name's Alex San Felipe, and if I've not met you before, I'm really excited to spend this time with you.

And I'm looking forward to diving into an industry report that I developed, but also some ideas for developing a plan for a podcast guest or a podcast host to be able to succeed long term so you don't pod fade like I did, like so many others do. As I just mentioned, I'm not alone in that, and I'll share some of the data in just a second here, but I also end up making it in podcasting, which I'm really grateful for. I had a second, third, and fourth show. And all three of those, I'd consider very successful. Second show I was able to sell. Third show I rolled into my fourth one, which is this show, podcasting made simple. And these have done very, very well because I learned something from that first mishap with podcasting, right? After eight weeks, realizing, hey, I didn't really go into this the right way and I podfated. That is so common in podcasting still. Even though it was harder back then, it might even be worse now because it's so easy. There's a minimal effort to get involved into it. So I'm going to read a couple of these things off my screen here. And if you want to see this report, it's podmatch.com slash report. Podmatch.com slash report. First off, when we look at this data, the overall industry buzz of podcasting, we consider it to be very high. At any point, if you go to search engines, it talk about, like, trends that people are talking about in the world, podcasting is always way, way up there. If you go to like Google specifically, talks about like the percentage. It's almost always like in the high 90s to 100%, like of like one of the most trending things in the world, which that's really cool, right? From the listenership perspective, we also rate the health very high because we're finding that it's continuously climbing its highest rate of our house. Like more and more people are listening to podcasts every single day. It's mentioned on TV shows, movies, and in daily lives, right? We talk about podcasting, which is really cool. Then we look at podcasters themselves, both hosts and guests. So both sides of the microphone, the health is what we consider to be very low. although there are millions of podcasts out at this point, there's only ever about 14% that are active. So 14% of all the millions of podcasters, that's not very many. It's around 400,000 at time of recording this. That number really hasn't moved much. Like, we keep on finding that more and more people quit. So I say 14% right now, eventually be 13% and that number of 400,000 might not change. It hasn't changed in years at this point. So I feel like saying that number, you know, it's like a hard number might be evergreen, at least until we can change something, right? But get this. So when we look at independent interview-based podcast, because that's kind of what we track within PodMatch, right? That's what our service does. Connects guests and hosts for interviews so we're always tracking the independent shows they're doing interviews because that's good for both our guests and our host there's about there's just under 120,000 of them at any given time that are active like think about that 120,000 podcasts. Many people are like hey Alex like I'm thinking about being a guest on a show I'm thinking about being a host, like, but it's so saturated. The reality is, it's not. You think about how many hundreds of millions of people listen to podcast every week. Like, that number isn't very big, right? Like, there's not as many options as we like to say that there are. And here's the thing. There just really isn't a whole lot of people that are making it in podcasting. Again, that's what I want to talk about today about. I want to share this data because I think

it's very eye-opening. Do you know that less than half of people that start a podcast as a guest or as a host make it to eight episodes? Whether you're a guest or host, like less than half of the people deciding, I'm going to be a host and be a guest. They get started. They do it, right? So they have one of their belt. From that one to eight, less than half of people make it that

far. And we're seeing that number get worse and worse and worse, the amount of people are actually making it. And then I consider like this sweet spot of podcasting, whether you're a guest or host, to be that 100 episode mark. So for a weekly show, just an example, that's basically two years. And like, I'm like, hey, be a guest on one every week for two years, be a host, release an episode every week for two years. That's kind of like when you can really start seeing some results that we've found. Less than 5% of people ever do that. Like, again, talk about unhealthy, right? As an industry, like, yeah, like the industry is doing great from a exposure perspective, from a

listener ship perspective, but from guest and host perspective, it's doing really bad. People just

aren't really making it right now. And so when we finally, this last number I want to share

here is when we look at what we consider like actively established, which means podcasters

that have passed that 100 episode mark as a guest as a host, the people that have kind of continuously improved their show, people that have really honed in their guesting efforts.

We call it actively established. There's about 35,000 shows, and then the guests are around that same amount that have actually been able to do this, which that's a big number, right?

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