Meghan Markle Halts Podcast To Focus On Lifestyle Brand And TV Projects.

Meghan Markle is one of the most watched women in the world, and among the most criticized too across the web. So after she launched new Lemonada Media series Confessions of a Female Founder in April, critics of the Duchess of Sussex jumped, with negative reviews of the show’s content and pointed out that it didn’t have the chart position as her earlier show, Archetypes. Now Markle says she is putting the series on indefinite hiatus.

In the June 17 episode, Markle says she is pausing the podcast to focus on her other business ventures, including her new lifestyle brand As Ever in addition to her television work. “I just realized I’m using this opportunity to share, and I love that, but I also need to use this opportunity to listen,” Markle says. “Does it mean it won’t come back? No.”

The podcast launched came as Markle debuted her new “With Love, Meghan” lifestyle series on Netflix.

The eight-episode season of Confessions of a Female Founder features Markle in conversation with female founders, while also giving listeners a peek behind the curtain of her own entrepreneurial efforts.

“I would love to bring the show back when I am at a different end of my founder journey,” Markle tells listeners, though suggesting it could be a year or more before that happens. “[At] a different time will be so exciting just to be able to compare and contrast,” she said.

Markle says Lemonada has been a “safe space” for her to return to podcasting. “I was so fortunate to find Lemonada, I love that it was a female-founded company that was doing podcasts and the women running it,” she tells listeners.

Lemonada announced it had signed Markle to its roster in February 2024, saying a new talk show was in development. But after a spring launch was announced, the two later said the new podcast would be pushed back to 2025 after Lemonada reportedly had concerns about clashes between the Duchess’ new Netflix show and her podcasting work. Under the deal with Lemonada, the earlier episodes of Archetypes, which had been exclusive to Spotify, have been re-released and widely distributed across all podcast apps.

Terms of Lemonada’s deal with Markle were not released. Spotify earlier paid a reported $25 million to Markle and Prince Harry, but the podcast marketplace has changed and such lucrative deals are much harder to come by. Spotify and Archewell Audio parted ways in June 2023 following the release of a single, 12-episode season of Archetypes.

While its content output was small, what it did release seemed to be a hit with listeners. Since Archetypes was released in 2022, it has had more than 10 million downloads, averaging nearly a million listens per episode.