We hear plenty of anecdotal evidence about a boom in podcasting since the phenomenal success of Sarah Koenig’s “Serial” podcast, but concrete data is hard to come by in this fledgling industry. Hats off to Josh Morgan, a podcaster himself, for scraping together 10 years of iTunes data to visualize key trends for the first time. He identifies 60,000 podcasts currently active on iTunes; the largest categories are Christianity, Music and Comedy.
Here is the money shot confirming the ‘Serial’ boom — it plots new podcasts launched over time (‘Serial’ debuted in July 2014):
Morgan includes many more charts and insights in his article on Medium, “How Podcasts Have Changed in Ten Years: By the Numbers“.
(Thanks to Nick Quah for pointing out this article in his HotPod newsletter now at NiemanLab.)