In early 2017, a colleague and I were discussing an upcoming podcast launch, debating which of Apple’s categories was the best fit: Business ? Technology ? Society & Culture ? Which of Apple’s categories was most appropriate, and would give the show its best chance of being discovered?

Josh Morgan had already done some fascinating analysis of Apple’s podcast categories in 2015, where he identified the most (and least) crowded categories across Apple’s podcast ecosystem.

But we were interested in top-performing podcasts. Specifically, we wanted to know:

Which categories are most represented in the Apple Podcasts Top 200?

How does category representation change over time?

So I wrote a short Python script to check the Apple Podcasts US Top 200. Then I ran my script once an hour, every hour, for an entire year. Here’s the result: