WhichPodcast Research · Updated 30 June 2026
Even popular podcasts go quiet: 5% haven't published in over 6 months.
We analysed 22,451 RSS podcasts with episode data from the WhichPodcast index and found that podcast inactivity is common even among discoverable, platform-distributed shows. The catalogue covers podcasts that appear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and similar major directories — shows that have already cleared the first hurdle of publication and distribution. These numbers describe that population, not the full universe of every RSS feed ever created. See the methodology section for a full discussion of what this index includes and how it compares to broader RSS datasets.
5%
silent for 6+ months
2.8%
silent for 12+ months
24 months
median observed publishing span
92%
reach 10 episodes
Key findings
- 1.5% of shows have not published in 6+ months.
- 2.2.8% have been completely silent for 12+ months — the harder measure of true abandonment.
- 3.The median observed publishing span is 24 months.
- 4.92% of shows reach episode 10, but only 56% reach episode 100.
- 5.Only 18% of shows reach 500 episodes.
Shows survive launch — but few sustain long-term output
Of the 22,451 shows in scope, 92% reach ten episodes — the launch-survival bar is comfortably clearable for shows that make it into our index. The thinning happens later: by 100 episodes only 56% of shows are still publishing, and by 500 episodes the field narrows to a small minority. The drop-off isn't a cliff at launch — it's a long, steady attrition through the middle years.
| Reached | Podcasts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 1 episode | 25,020 | 100.0% |
| ≥ 3 episodes | 24,625 | 98.4% |
| ≥ 5 episodes | 24,204 | 96.7% |
| ≥ 10 episodes | 23,087 | 92.3% |
| ≥ 25 episodes | 20,261 | 81.0% |
| ≥ 50 episodes | 17,499 | 69.9% |
| ≥ 100 episodes | 14,006 | 56.0% |
| ≥ 250 episodes | 8,216 | 32.8% |
| ≥ 500 episodes | 4,490 | 17.9% |
How long do podcasts keep publishing?
For each podcast that publishes more than one episode, we measure the time between its first episode and its most recent. That's its observed publishing span — the period over which it's actively known to have published. Note that currently-active shows are included: a show that's still publishing has a span-so-far, not a final lifespan. Even with active shows included, the distribution is heavily concentrated at the shorter end.
Most podcasts are quiet
Publishing span tells you how long a show has produced episodes; dormancy tells you whether they're alive right now. The chart below buckets every show by how recently it published its last episode. 5% of indexed podcasts haven't released an episode in the last 6 months; 2.8% in the last 12.
Some genres are stickier than others
Survival rates aren't uniform across the catalogue. Some categories retain creators well past episode 25; others bleed out fast. Here are the top and bottom five genres by share of shows that reach 25 episodes (minimum 50 shows per genre to avoid small-sample noise).
Stickiest genres
- Crypto & Web390.4%
- Gaming89.2%
- Sports86.7%
- Interviews86.3%
- Comedy80.5%
Highest attrition
- Society & Culture40.2%
- Technology64.6%
- Storytelling67.1%
- True Crime67.8%
- Fiction70.7%
View full table — all genres ranked by survival rate
| Genre | Total | Reach 10 ep | Reach 25 ep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technology | 1,066 | 86.3% | 64.6% |
| Comedy | 922 | 93.5% | 80.5% |
| Sports | 805 | 97.1% | 86.7% |
| Education | 778 | 91.1% | 76.7% |
| Business | 766 | 89.7% | 71.8% |
| History | 745 | 89.7% | 75.8% |
| Interviews | 737 | 95.0% | 86.3% |
| News | 648 | 93.2% | 79.3% |
| Science | 620 | 88.9% | 71.8% |
| True Crime | 574 | 85.2% | 67.8% |
| Self-Improvement | 518 | 90.3% | 72.8% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 420 | 90.2% | 76.2% |
| Fiction | 348 | 83.9% | 70.7% |
| Gaming | 231 | 95.2% | 89.2% |
| Storytelling | 228 | 88.2% | 67.1% |
| Society & Culture | 127 | 93.7% | 40.2% |
| Crypto & Web3 | 104 | 100.0% | 90.4% |
Methodology
- Source
- WhichPodcast's catalogue of 41,446 podcasts, ingested from Apple Podcasts, Listen Notes, and direct RSS feeds. 22,451 of these have their episode list ingested into our database; the analyses on this page restrict to that subset.
- What we mean by “podfade”
- The term comes from the podcasting community — a show that has stopped publishing new episodes but technically remains in directories. We treat any show with no episode in the last 12 months as “silent,” and any show with no episode in the last 24 months as “abandoned.”
- Survival curve
- For each milestone N ∈ {1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500}, we compute the share of shows whose lifetime episode count is at least N. This is a snapshot of the current catalogue rather than a cohort survival analysis — it conflates “new shows that will eventually grow” with “old shows that stalled,” so the early-stage attrition rates will look worse than they actually are for any given cohort. We may publish a true Kaplan–Meier analysis in a future revision.
- Observed publishing span (formerly “lifespan”)
- Days between each show's first and most recent episode. A currently-publishing show has a span-so-far, not a final lifespan — and active shows are deliberately included in this metric. The result: the long-tail buckets will continue to grow as ongoing shows accumulate years, and our median is a lower bound on what a true end-of-life cohort study would find.
- How this index compares to the full RSS universe
- Open datasets like the Podcast Index track upwards of 4.5 million RSS feeds. The WhichPodcast index is a small fraction of that — intentionally. We index shows that appear in major listener-facing directories (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Listen Notes) and exclude feeds that have never been submitted to or accepted by those platforms. The effect is significant: the full RSS universe contains millions of test feeds, spam feeds, single-episode experiments, and private or corporate feeds that were never intended for public listeners. Survival and dormancy rates in the wider RSS dataset are therefore much higher — some analyses put the proportion of feeds silent for 6+ months at over 60%. Our 5% figure is lower precisely because we are measuring a pre-filtered population of shows that cleared the distribution hurdle. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. Ours asks: “Among podcasts listeners can actually find and subscribe to on major platforms, how many have gone quiet?”
- Known limitations
- YouTube-only podcasts are not in scope. Our index is built from RSS feeds. A growing portion of new podcasting activity is YouTube-first and won't appear here.
- English bias. Listen Notes ingestion has historically over-indexed English-language podcasts.
- Survivorship bias on metadata-only rows. Shows that exist as metadata in upstream catalogues but have no episodes ingested yet are excluded from the survival and lifespan analyses but counted in the headline catalogue total.
- Update cadence
- This page regenerates daily. The data slice shown was computed on 30 June 2026.
Cite this report
Free to cite, quote and embed. Recommended citation:
WhichPodcast (2026). The Podfade Problem: How Many Podcasts Actually Survive? Retrieved from https://whichpodcast.com/research/podfade
Writing about podfade?
Need a custom slice of the data — a specific genre, country, year, or cohort? Email zaq@lengmedia.com and we'll help where we can. We'll usually turn around a custom cut within 48 hours.
All charts on this page are available as PNG on request and the underlying aggregated data can be shared under a CC-BY licence.