Podcast industry data through the lens of Listen Notes, the best podcast search engine and database.
There are at least 3,338,124 podcasts* and 194,600,212 episodes in the world.
* Other websites / apps may claim that they have way more than 3,338,124 podcasts in their
database.
This is because they inflate the number by including A LOT of 1) podcasts that were already deleted long time ago;
2) super low-quality podcasts (e.g., no episodes at all, only one 10-second episode in the RSS feed for testing,
or machine-generated audio);
3) non-audio contents distributed via rss (e.g., RSS feeds with only PDF files, not audio).
On the other hand, we deploy automatic scripts (24/7) and human moderators (daily) to clean up data.
We try our best to minimize the number of such bad "podcasts" in our database.
By contrast,
IMDB has over 8.3 million titles (movies, TV shows, TV
episodes),
Spotify
has over 70 million tracks, and
Audible has over 470,000 audiobooks.