WhichPodcast Research · Updated 16 May 2026
Even popular podcasts go quiet — 39% have been silent for over a year.
New analysis of 2,363podcasts in the WhichPodcast index — a catalogue biased toward popular, charting shows — finds that even successful podcasts fade fast. We call the phenomenon “podfade.” A meaningful fraction of shows in the index haven't published a new episode in months, and the median lifespan is shorter than most in the industry assume.
1%
never reach episode 3
6%
never reach episode 10
39%
silent for 12+ months
18 months
median podcast lifespan
The survival curve drops off a cliff
Of the 2,363 shows that publish at least one episode, only 94% make it to ten episodes. By 100 episodes the survivors are a rounding error (52.3%).
| Reached | Podcasts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 1 episode | 2,363 | 100.0% |
| ≥ 3 episodes | 2,345 | 99.2% |
| ≥ 5 episodes | 2,306 | 97.6% |
| ≥ 10 episodes | 2,223 | 94.1% |
| ≥ 25 episodes | 1,689 | 71.5% |
| ≥ 50 episodes | 1,516 | 64.2% |
| ≥ 100 episodes | 1,237 | 52.3% |
| ≥ 250 episodes | 812 | 34.4% |
| ≥ 500 episodes | 473 | 20.0% |
How long do podcasts last?
For each podcast that publishes more than one episode, we measure the gap between its first episode and its most recent. That's its “lifespan” — and the distribution is brutal at the short end.
Most podcasts are quiet
Lifespan tells you when shows die; dormancy tells you whether they're alive right now. The chart below buckets every show by how recently it published its last episode. 39% of indexed podcasts haven't released an episode in the last 12 months.
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
- Fiction79.9%
- Education78.2%
- Sports75.8%
- Comedy71.5%
- Storytelling71.0%
Highest attrition
- Society & Culture0.0%
- Health & Wellness15.1%
- Self-Improvement15.1%
- Technology57.6%
- Business62.4%
View full table — all genres ranked by survival rate
| Genre | Total | Reach 10 ep | Reach 25 ep |
|---|---|---|---|
| True Crime | 311 | 91.6% | 70.4% |
| Comedy | 309 | 95.1% | 71.5% |
| News | 294 | 95.9% | 67.7% |
| Technology | 271 | 93.4% | 57.6% |
| Sports | 256 | 96.1% | 75.8% |
| Storytelling | 224 | 96.0% | 71.0% |
| Business | 205 | 90.2% | 62.4% |
| Education | 197 | 96.4% | 78.2% |
| Fiction | 194 | 95.4% | 79.9% |
| History | 154 | 94.2% | 69.5% |
| Science | 151 | 91.4% | 70.2% |
| Society & Culture | 128 | 93.0% | 0.0% |
| Health & Wellness | 53 | 94.3% | 15.1% |
| Self-Improvement | 53 | 94.3% | 15.1% |
Methodology
- Source
- WhichPodcast's catalogue of 9,334 podcasts, ingested from Apple Podcasts, Listen Notes, and direct RSS feeds. 2,363 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.
- Lifespan
- Days between each show's first and most recent episode. A show that's still actively publishing has a lifespan-so-far rather than a final lifespan — so the long-tail buckets will continue to grow as currently-active shows accumulate years.
- 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 16 May 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.