Fewer Launches In May, But Podcasters Remain More Active This Year.

The number of new podcast debuts worldwide slipped to its lowest level since December last month. Listen Notes reports it detected 13,225 new podcast launches during May, a 17% decline from the just over 16,000 shows that launched in April. It brings the number of new debuts this year to 83,390, based on its analysis.

The true measure of the industry’s health is considered the number of active shows, however. And by that metric, podcasting is having a banner year. Listen Notes’ latest update shows 503,739 have been logged as active this year. That is more than double the number of active shows in all of 2023, and it is pacing well ahead of the 270,499 active shows recorded last year. 

Listen Notes has in recent months undertaken a new effort to remove from its listings AI-generated podcasts that it considers fake. It scrubbed 3,049 listings last month, in what was the second-biggest takedown to date. The most ever was recorded in March when the company says it pulled 3,066 fake podcasts from its total.

The podcast search engine Listen Notes says its database now shows there are at least 3.57 million podcasts that have been published, two-thirds of which are based in the U.S. Those shows have released more than 177 million episodes to date.

In an effect to embrace the tech industry’s “radical transparency” mindset, CEO Wenbin Fang recently made a blog post on how he runs the company. Read it HERE.