There are a lot of moving parts in podcasting and some of the most common questions I receive when launching or producing podcasts for clients are:
What length should my podcast be?
What is the ideal podcast length?
How long should my podcast be to receive the most downloads?
My answer has always been, whatever you have the bandwidth to do. I’ve listened to 5 minute episodes in the morning for a quick jolt of motivation and I’ve listened to 75 minute podcast episodes that I’ve had to chunk into separate times during my day. And so long as the episode is good, I’m going to get back to it. I’m willing to bet most podcast listeners do the same.
And that’s the beauty of podcasting. Your listeners can easily pick back up right where they left off at their leisure.
But to solidify my intuition, I did a quick search and found that my favorite podcasting platform, Libsyn, did an analysis recently and came up with some very powerful statistics on the perfect length of a podcast episode.
They compared the top 200 episodes in Apple Podcasts, and this was the takeaway.
In 2021 out of the top 200 podcasts on Apple:
- 8.1% of podcast episodes were under 22 minutes in length.
- 69% of podcast episodes were 40 minutes or longer.
- 5.5% of podcast episodes were 120 minutes or longer.
Additionally, 50% of episodes were over 60 minutes and 50% were under 60 minutes.
So the answer to this very popular question is, there is no ideal length for podcast episodes! So have fun behind the mic!!
There is no ideal length for podcast episodes!
Source: Libsyn