Podcast Host Rankings by Episode Share (September 2021)

October 7, 2021

This is an archived version, the current version is here.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 1.9 million in September 2021) and identified which podcast hosting company it belongs to.

We used the actual media file url (past any tracking redirects) to identify the host instead of the feed url domain, which can often undercount hosts that offer custom domains.

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 September 2021.

A rounded 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 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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