Spotify claims there were 1.2m new podcasts in 2021, 80% of whom, were from Anchor. Listen Notes claim a total of 729,691 podcasts were new in 2021 - maybe they can’t see the exclusives in Spotify’s catalogue
The number of shows on Spotify is continuing to increase dramatically. Spotify claims a catalogue of 4.4m podcasts in July 2021, claimed 5.2m podcasts in August 2022, and now 5.5m podcasts in January 2023.
Industry expert Daniel J Lewis pointed out that new Anchor shows used to be auto-submitted to Apple Podcasts: and are no longer. Apple Podcasts stopped auto-submissions in the middle of 2021
After automatic submission of low-quality podflash shows stopped from Anchor, it was the biggest reason that the total number of new shows available via RSS in Apple dramatically dropped.
Podnews analysis claims companies offering predominantly free podcast hosting, like Anchor, saw the number of new shows hosted on those platforms drop by as much as 93% when comparing 2020 to 2022
The increasing number of episodes suggests that podcasters aren’t, as the narrative suggests, “giving up”. Committed podcasters are continuing to release new episodes, at an ever-increasing rate.