There are TONS of podcasts on the open market now. Pandemic has actually seen a lot of people step away from their jobs (voluntarily or not), to find themselves with time and talent that they are turning towards podcasting. The barriers to entering the podcast world are easily surmountable, so the sheer number of podcasts in production seems to continue to rise.
Still, I will not tell you there are too many podcasts. For a number of reasons, which I’ll try to list here:
Market Saturation
First, there are not quite one-million podcasts in production. (Oberlo says Apple Podcasts carries something like 850,000-ish current titles.) BUT, all the other forms of digital media in the world are measured solidly into the millions. That’s plural: millions. Something like 30-million YouTube channels, over 500 million blogs (you’ve got a lot of reading to do), not to mention songs, books, and games. All measured in the hundreds of millions. There are something like 1.2 million video games on the market. And I’m not sure that includes apps. So podcasts are still a small piece of that overall digital pie.
Regularity
Among those 850,000-ish podcasts, a lot of them never get past their first “season.” You would be surprised how many podcasts never get past their twelfth episode. You may be shocked how many publish one episode, and then you never hear from them again. Among those that do remain active, many are inconsistently produced or published on some irregular schedule.
Innovate
I don’t know what your podcast is about. You may be a hobbyist, and you may be a pro. But I’ll bet that your audience is a specific niche. (And if it isn’t, it probably should be. But that is a topic for another day.) Why does this matter? Because your niche may be seeking your content. EVEN IF there are other folks out there speaking to the same niche, you could do something others haven’t yet done.
Innovation stops whenever someone says: “Oh, the market is saturated.” or “There are already 20 people in that space who are producers.” You should always strive to innovate. Even if you’re not talking podcasts.
You may have a best-selling book in your head. But the world will never know it if you don’t write it. You may have a message or a story that someone in your audience really needs to hear. But there’s really only one way to make that happen.
As always, this is the part where I invite you to contact me if I can help you with any of these things.