With two years’ worth of data to work with, we can now try to spot trends and seasonal patterns in the makeup of the Apple Podcasts Top 200.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

Society and Culture continues to grow

Society & Culture is a big, broad category. It includes true crime shows like Dirty John, music shows like DISGRACELAND, celebrity-hosted shows like Dr. Phil’s Phil in the Blanks, public radio veterans This American Life, and many more.

Consequently, Society & Culture is among the most crowded in Apple Podcasts. It also continues to be the most-represented category in the Top 200, accounting for more than 25% of the shows listed.

As podcasting reaches ever-larger, more mainstream audiences, the popularity of shows in such a big, broad category doesn’t come as a surprise.

Sports spikes (🏈?)

Last year, I hypothesized that a September spike for Sports & Recreation might be related to the beginning of the NFL season.

Overall, Sports & Recreation shows were less present on the Top 200 in 2018, but again, we saw a spike in September… right around the beginning of NFL football.

Something weird happened with Business podcasts

For a few weeks in September-October 2018, the number of Business podcasts in the US Top 200 shot up like a rocket, then quickly fell.

This timeline aligns with several reports about podcast chart manipulation, many of which cite Business shows as examples. Coincidence? I suspect not.

For reference, here are the shows that appeared on the Business charts in mid-October 2018, at the peak of that category’s representation on the US Top 200. And here are the shows that appears on the charts in mid-November 2018, once representation returned to previous levels.

I’ll let sharp-eyed chart-watchers draw their own conclusions by comparing the two charts side-by-side.

The New Year’s Health bump

If you look closely at both January 2018 and January 2019, you’ll see a noticable bump in the number of Health shows on the US Top 200, which drops off in the following weeks.