I Analyzed 1,000 Top Podcasts: Here's How Often They Actually Publish

Oct 30, 2025

I work with podcasters. Recently got access to a rich podcasting dataset (around 170k shows) for an unrelated client project.

So I thought why not do some side quests out of curiosity? The first thing I wanted to look at: how often do the biggest podcasters publish?

I pulled the top 1,000 shows (by audience) from that dataset.

Here's what I found:

Weekly shows dominate, as expected. But nearly 1 in 5 publish daily (way more than I thought).

First I show the results, then methodology, then appendix links.

Results

Visual

Top 1% Podcast Cadence

Distribution of 1,000 highest-audience shows by publishing frequency.

Adithyan Ilangovan | adithyan.io
Daily18.5%
Near Daily13.5%
Weekly58.2%
Monthly8.3%
Other1.5%

Table

Frequency bucket*ShowsShare
Weekly (3–9 days)58258.2%
Daily (~1 day)18518.5%
Near Daily (≤3 days)13513.5%
Monthly (10–29 days)838.3%
Other (>30 days)151.5%
Total1,000100%

*Frequency buckets explained in the methodology section below.

What Stood Out

  • Daily isn't rare. 185 shows (18.5%) publish every day. That's way more than I expected. Most are newsroom-style shows that act like broadcast desks (NPR's Up First, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Glenn Beck Program). You also get daily scripture feeds like The Bible in a Year and sports shows that follow game cycles. Some shows post multiple times per day or break long episodes into clips.

  • Weekly dominates. 582 shows (58.2%) stick to the 3-9 day rhythm. Shows that drop the same day each week (This American Life, Crime Junkie, Radiolab, Revisionist History, Criminal, Hidden Brain, etc.). People know when to expect them.

  • Near-daily surprised me. 135 shows publish every 2-3 days. Most seem to be personality-driven shows. Think My Favorite Murder, Office Ladies, Pod Save America, Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend. They're evergreen-ish but reactive.

  • Slow can still work, but I'm not sure why. 98 shows publish monthly or slower and still hit the top 1%. Some look like high-production investigative series (Dr. Death) or prestige history shows. But I haven't dug deep enough to know if they're intentionally slow for quality reasons or just have inconsistent schedules. The monthly ones cluster around 14-21 days, the really slow ones can go 36-120 days between episodes.

Methodology

Here's how I crunched the numbers:

  • Started with ~167k shows from the PodSeeker dataset.
  • Then I sorted by audience size and grabbed the top 1,000 (for anyone interested, that's about 73k+ listeners boundary at that percentile).
  • For each show, I looked at their RSS feed and pulled up to 40 recent episodes.
  • Calculated the gaps between publish dates. Used median gaps instead of averages because medians ignore one-off breaks or publishing bursts.
  • Bucketed the results into frequency buckets: Daily (~1 day), Near-daily (≤3 days), Weekly (3-9 days), Monthly (10-29 days), Other (>30 days).

Links to specific shows in each cadence bucket:

  • Daily (185 shows): Coming soon
  • Near-daily (135 shows): Coming soon
  • Weekly (582 shows): Coming soon
  • Monthly+ (98 shows): Coming soon

I'll add the full roster with episode links, medians, Apple IDs, and RSS feeds as I figure out the best way to display all this data here in this post.

What's Next

This turned out to be way more fun than I expected. I'm planning to extend the analysis outwards and look at the top 5%, top 10%, and see if these splits hold or if there's something unique about the very top tier.

And also dig a little more on other sort of data that I have. For example, I want to dig deeper into those slow publishers. Are they intentionally high-production, or just inconsistent? And growth patterns: do daily shows grow faster than others and do they actually have retention?

If you have other interesting angles you'd want me to explore (or want to collaborate on this), hit me up.

Adithyan