Podcasting Could Use a Good Asteroid

I'm told there are now over 4.5 million podcasts in existence.

The industry is worth 40 billion dollars, 158 million Americans tune in monthly, and the medium has finally achieved the kind of cultural ubiquity previously reserved for terrestrial radio or the evening news.

But if you actually spend time (literally, any time at all) scrolling through the "New & Noteworthy" or the top-tier recommendations, you'll find that podcasting feels increasingly like a ghost town built out of gold. There's an almost hollowed-out quality to it; we've built a massive infrastructure for human communication, only to realize that we've run out of things to say - or more accurately, that the incentives have shifted such that saying something interesting is now a disadvantage.

In evolutionary biology, a mass extinction event is a clearing of the brush. It removes the over-specialized, the bloated, and the lucky-but-lazy, making room for the small, furry mammals of the creative world to actually do something interesting.

Well, podcasting could do with a good asteroid.

We're living through the aftermath of the 2020-2022 boom: a period where "dumb money" flooded the gates and every celebrity, brand, former-detective and hobbyist with a USB microphone decided they were the next Joe Rogan or Sarah Koenig. 

In 2020, we saw the highest growth of new shows in history.

By 2025, the hangover has set in. 

Only about 10% of those 4.5 million podcasts are actually active. The rest are "podfaded" relics - three-episode arcs that began with bright-eyed enthusiasm and ended when the creators realized that talking to a void is harder than it looks.

We're left with a top-heavy ecosystem where the giants - the pre-2020 incumbents who already have their audiences baked in - suck up all the oxygen, while the middle class of podcasting has become both bloated and neutered. Shows launched before the Great Pandemic Boom outperform newer shows by an embarrassing margin. Advertisers certainly aren't looking for the next big thing; they're retreating to the safety of the Old Guard.

It's a feedback loop that's entirely poisonous for creativity. But because the barriers to entry are so low, the signal-to-noise ratio keeps plummeting. With the rise of AI-powered editing and "seamless content repurposing," it's never been easier to make a podcast that sounds professional without actually being good. You'll find thousands of shows with perfect audio quality and professional-grade cover art that contain absolutely zero intellectual nutritional value. They're the Soylent of media, fulfilling the basic requirements of "a podcast" without providing any of the spark of human connection that made the medium special in the first place.

Each individual creator is incentivized to use these tools to keep up with the volume requirements of the algorithm. The aggregate result is a sea of indistinguishable, processed sludge.

And despite the infinite niches, the format is oppressively uniform. 

It's usually two or three dudes, ostensibly peers, engaging in a semi-structured rambling session that occasionally brushes up against a point before veering off into inside jokes. They'll urge you to subscribe. They'll read an ad for a mattress or a mental health app with the same tone of ironic detachment. They'll interview a guest who is currently on a "podcast tour," meaning you're about to hear the exact same anecdotes you heard on three other shows that week, recited with the practiced spontaneity of a politician on the campaign trail.

And so on.

Meanwhile, YouTube has become the number one podcasting platform. The visual shift has forced creators to focus on "clip-ability" and "thumb-nailing" rather than the slow-burn, intimate deep dives that defined podcasting in 2014. If you aren't making faces for a camera or staging a high-contrast set, you're invisible. But the things that make for a good YouTube video are often the exact opposite of what makes for a good podcast. A podcast should be a companion; a YouTube video is a spectacle.

In trying to be both, the medium is losing its soul.

And by flooding the zone with "basically decent" audio, the ecosystem makes it impossible to find the truly great.

When thousands of new shows are launched every single day, the rational response for a listener isn't to go hunting for a hidden gem. The rational response is to stick with the three shows you've listened to since 2018. Why risk forty minutes of your life on a "bold new voice" when you know exactly what you're getting with the established veterans?

There is a concept in economics called "induced demand," usually applied to traffic. If you build more lanes, you don't reduce congestion; you just encourage more people to drive until the traffic is exactly as bad as it was before. We have built infinite lanes of audio content, and we have filled them with the traffic of our own voices.

The human brain was not evolved to maintain parasocial relationships with six dozen podcasters. The cognitive load is too high. The emotional rent is too expensive.

I find myself paralyzed by choice. Do I listen to the deep-dive history show that requires my full attention? The tech news roundup that will be obsolete in forty-eight hours? The comedy show that's only funny if you've listened to the previous two hundred episodes to understand the lore? Usually, I panic and put on literal noise. Thank God, after all, for Merzbow.

Something has to give.

I don’t know what a podcasting extinction event looks like. But I am entirely convinced that we need a reset.

We need a new beginning.

At the very least, the “Cambrian Explosion” of podcasting could do with a pruning.

Listen: I am generally in favor of people creating art and content. I am broadly positive about podcasting as a format and medium. I consider myself a friend and fan of good folks like the Day One network, who take podcasting seriously and treat it as a craft.

So if you're thinking about starting a podcast, I won't try to talk you out of it.

But I'd suggest you ask yourself a simple question before you buy the microphone: what will make this different from the four million that already exist? If you don't have a compelling answer, maybe consider writing a blog instead. At least when you abandon it, the corpse won't clog up anyone's feed.