Most Podcasts Are Still In English
Over at Hot Pod, Nick Quah discussed the landscape of non-English podcasts. The takeaways are familiar to anyone who has looked at this issue in recent years:
- Podcast awareness is growing among non-English speakers
- Non-English podcasts are growing, both in number and reach, and Spanish podcasts appear particularly promising
- Significant hurdles remain for non-English podcasts
I think all of those points are correct, but I wanted to examine point #2 in greater depth and come away with some numbers. So, how is the podcast landscape changing when it comes to language?
Quick methodology overview: I scraped the Apple Podcast directory for data on ~400,000 active podcasts. All but ~7,200 shows had a language listed. While Apple’s API doesn’t provide initial release dates for podcasts, I noticed that Apple IDs are assigned sequentially based on initial submission date. Using these IDs, I was able to determine the date each podcast was created.
Armed with this data, let’s look at a few key trends. First, the year each podcast in the directory was created:
The most important trend here is obvious: year-over-year growth in new podcast listings is huge. I’ve been skeptical that new content growth is actually higher than it’s been in the past, but there were 50% more shows added in 2017 than 2016, and 2018 is on track to dwarf 2016. Growth seems to be accelerating, but how does this picture look when we separate new English shows and new non-English shows?
For the last few years, new non-English podcast listings have grown 30–40% year-over-year. That’s much higher than I anticipated! But as a result of even faster growth in new English shows, the percentage of all new shows in a non-English language is actually steadily declining:
That’s not a bad sign for non-English shows, of course, as long as they have access to the talent, audience, and advertisers needed to make quality shows. There are over 100 languages represented in the “non-English” category, and some of which are growing more quickly than others. Surprisingly though, Spanish-language podcasts aren’t growing particularly fast.
German, French, and Portuguese all had more year-over-year show growth than Spanish — though Spanish remains the language with the second-most shows overall. And though I count 115 languages with shows in the Apple Podcast directory, few languages have more than 100 podcasts:
What does it mean?
I expected that English-language shows would be the majority of new podcasts, but I thought its share of new shows would be shrinking. What does it mean that English continues to be so overrepresented?
I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just a bubble, and English podcasts are the most overinflated. Maybe non-English shows are systematically underrepresented in the Apple Podcast directory in ways that I overlooked. Maybe non-English podcasts have listener growth that’s not reflected in directory growth.
My gut feeling is that other languages have yet to experience a Serial-style moment, where podcasts have escaped their niche audience and registered in popular consciousness. I think we’re seeing undeveloped potential in non-English podcasts, but we might also be seeing overdeveloped potential in English podcasts. What do you think?
