Mosquitoes live for a few days, or weeks.

Tortoises can live for more than 150 years.

So… what’s the average age of a podcast? This week, I crunched some numbers, and learned that the median age of all podcasts available as of late 2018 is roughly 6 months (or 174 days).

How to calculate a podcast’s “age”

To determine a podcast’s age, we need to examine two publish dates: the date of its first episode, and the date of its most recent episode.

For example, if a show’s first episode was published on December 16, 2014, and its most recent episode was published on November 19, 2018, the show’s age is 1,434 days, or roughly 4 years.

Just for fun, I calculated the ages of 549,740 shows. Here’s what I found:

• Many shows have an age of 0, because their first episode is their only episode, or they bulk dropped a bunch of episodes at exactly the same time
• Some of the longest-living shows have been publishing for more than a decade. A few examples: Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, the Stanford Social Innovation Review Podcast, and Christian podcasts like HOPE Family Fellowship Sermons.
• The median age of all the podcasts I analyzed is 174 days. That’s roughly 25 weeks, or a little less than 6 months.

There are some important caveats here: not all podcasts make their entire back catalog available in their feeds, some CMSes truncate podcast feeds, and some podcast feeds become unavailable over time. The average podcast lifespan of 174 days is based on shows that were indexable in November 2018.

Why does a podcast’s lifespan matter?

As I’ve written before, podcasting is a long game. 12% of podcasts have only published a single episode.

As my colleague Steve says, consistency over time matters:

Too many times, I’ve been part of media companies where the expectation is to launch a new show or a new format and instantly “win.” The problem is that you can almost never instantly win at anything.

Some of the most popular shows in the world have been publishing for years. The Joe Rogan Experience, Stuff You Should Know, and This American life all have deep back catalogs, and they’ve built loyal audiences because they keep showing up.

What’s the lifespan of your podcast? Are you a mosquito or a tortoise?

Sign up for the Pacific Content Newsletter: audio strategy, analysis, and insight in your inbox. Once a week.