Podcast Host Rankings by Episode Share (December 2021)

January 2, 2022

This is an archived version, the current version is here.

One of the ways to measure the health of the current podcast ecosystem is to measure the number of new episodes published in a given period.

We looked at every single new podcast episode published (about 1.5 million in December 2021) and identified which podcast hosting company it belongs to.

We use the actual media file url (ignoring any non-host tracking redirects) to identify the host. It is not based on the feed url domain, which can often undercount hosts that offer custom domains.

In cases where a retail podcast host uses another podcast host to serve the audio, we credit the first host. In cases where a podcast migrates from one host to new host, we credit the new host. In general, the intent is to identify the podcast host the podcaster would say they are dealing with.

There are many market share numbers floating around out there for the various podcast hosting companies, but it’s often difficult to compare apples to apples – especially when considering inactive shows. Looking at only new episodes is one fairly objective way to compare each platform, at least by sheer amount of new output.

Below is the ranking of podcast hosters ordered by new episodes published during the month of December 2021.

A percentage of episode share is also included if > 0%.

Analysis by John Spurlock

Thanks to the Podcast Index for crawling every podcast, and giving us a signal of when to check for new episodes.

And thanks to the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group for maintaining a list of media url patterns. We’ve incorporated these patterns along with some of our own to come up with the host identification and metadata for this ranking.

Updated 2022-01-10, was missing data for December 31, now fixed.

Updated 2022-01-02, with data for the month of December 2021. Now filtering out episodes with the same media file url across multiple feeds (e.g. in aggregate category feeds), and filtered out dynamic search feeds from archive.org (they do not represent “shows” for any meaningful definition of the term). Universe shrank by 10.6% with these new filters. After that, December’s universe was still 6.8% smaller than November’s, presumably due to the holiday season.

Updated 2021-12-02, with data for the month of November 2021.

Updated 2021-11-11, tweaked the host identification algorithm: in cases where one known host performs a temporary redirect (302, 307) to another known host as part of a single request chain, we credit the redirecting host, not the target. For permanent redirects (301), we credit the target.

Updated 2021-11-11, added a new footer link to last month’s version.

Updated 2021-11-10, with data for the month of October 2021.

Updated 2021-10-09, to clarify the universe and identification scheme, added an overall episode count, and replaced short domains with hosting company names.

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