After listening to my favorite podcast, Hardcore History and hearing the host Dan Carlin guest star on Slate’s Political Gabfest, I started thinking about how popular the Hardcore History podcast is.  While many podcasts are 30 or 60 minutes, the latest Hardcore History episode is nearly 4 hours long.
That got me thinking about the intersection of quality and brevity. Â Common wisdom in digital marketing is that shorter is better, no one wants to dedicate large chunks of time to a program, right? But is that always the case? And how does that reconcile with longer shows like Hardcore History? To investigate this further, I looked into the most popular podcasts as of 8-18-24 as ranked by Stitcher. I mapped out the top 20 listed podcasts and recorded their most recent podcast episode length.
The result, for the data set reviewed, longer podcasts on average are more popular as seen in the black trendline below.
Longer podcasts are more popular
Longer podcasts are more popular
Focus on Quality
This is just one data sample, yet it shows that people find value in a quality program, no matter the length. So, go ahead create quality long-form content!
I’m a bit of a podcast junkie so let me know your favorite podcast in the comments…
Photo credit: Flickr
1 comments
Nice post. Limited data (which is probably not your fault -everything’s a freaking black box with podcasting) but I appreciate you putting it all together!
I’m surprised The Art of Charm isn’t on there but sometimes we dip in and out of the Stitcher top 25 or whatever