How long is too long? What’s the right duration for a podcast? This is one of the first questions ever asked when people are thinking about making a podcast. Here’s an excerpt from James Cridland.

The scientific method

Podcasts are a multi-tasking medium - that is, you can listen to a podcast while you do something else. If you want to know the optimum duration for a podcast, you might want to know how long “something else” is.

For example, the average commuting time in the US is 26 minutes. If you make a podcast longer than the average commute time, you could reasonably expect that podcast to be less satisfying for those who listen to podcasts while commuting. However, an average - by its very nature - means many peoples’ commute takes shorter, while others take longer.

So, it might be worth looking at the data. The overall average length of a podcast in 2019 is about 37 minutes; the average length of a podcast in the video games category is twice that.

But that 37 minutes figure includes all podcasts, whether they’re popular or not. How long is a popular one? It turns out that the average length of a top 100 podcast (in October 2018) is 53 minutes. Rob Walch from Libsyn also has data from 2017, based on Libsyn popular downloads.

By July 2019, Megaphone, too, was reporting that podcasts are getting shorter. In August 2019, research showed that the most popular commercials on YouTube were just 6 seconds long. And in December 2019, RAIN News was comparing the total length of daily news podcasts with the amount of ads in them - and how long they took to get going.

A podcast survey in Nigeria at the end of 2019 says that 54% of Nigerians prefer podcasts to be shorter than 40 minutes (so nearly half prefer them to be longer.)

Perception is reality, though. Edison Research interviewed 1,000 Americans who were familiar with podcasts - but don’t listen to them. Why? Because, 50% of Americans say: “podcasts are too long”.

Two thirds of listeners do come back to a podcast later to continue listening, according to research of radio fans; but the same survey says 21% of listeners - one in five - never come back.