The average podcaster spends 13.94 hours working on each episode. That is according to a survey of creators conducted by Headliner, the podcast promotion platform. It finds a majority (54%) of the time goes to creating the episode, with editing accounting for 27% of the time spent. The remaining 19% of the time goes to promoting the episode.
Headliner says among the 190 podcasters that completed its survey, it finds that veteran creators who have been producing a show for a decade or more spend the most time on promotion, while middle-age shows – between seven to nine years old – spend the least time on promotions.
One reason more podcasters may not be promoting their show is they don’t like that part of the job. When Headliner asked creators whether they enjoyed specific parts of the process, promotion came up last scoring 5.52 on the enjoyment scale. “Podcast promotion definitely received the least amount of love in our survey,” says Headliner in a blog post. It says about half (48.7%) of podcasters said they spend one hour or less promoting their podcast. Newbies and vets seemed to enjoy the podcast promotion part the most, with “middle-aged” podcasts scoring it the lowest at 4.61 out of 10.
Editing was more a mixed bag in terms of enjoyment, it says. It had an average 6.01 on the enjoyment scale. But there is a caveat. “There were groups who loved editing, some that really didn’t like it – but most were pretty ‘meh’ about editing,” says Headliner. It notes that newbies and vets reported enjoying the editing process the most and “middle-aged” shows enjoying editing the least.
The biggest determinative factor may be the time spent doing a particular task. Headliner says its data shows the more amount of time podcasters spent doing a task, the more they seemed to enjoy it.
“Creation definitely took up the most time, and it certainly had the highest enjoyment reported. On the flip side, podcast promotion received the least attention and the least love. Editing seemed to be fairly love-hate, with a positive correlation popping up between time spent and enjoyment received,” it says.
Among other findings in the survey: nearly half (47%) of respondents reported audience feedback shaped their podcast. No surprise then that nearly all (93%) of survey takers said they spend time engaging with their audience.