It shows how podcast length relates to “time spent listening” or TSL. According to this the average listener gets through 62% of a podcast under 5 minutes long versus only 22% of episodes over an hour. The data is flawed - it was collected from an unknown sample size of Omny Studio hosted shows - but it does provide some food for thought.

Takeaway: Shorter might be better - and content that appears earlier in an episode is more likely to be heard.

A lot of listeners don’t make it to the end of the show - so frontload your most important content. Ads and other content after the first quarter of the show may not be heard, especially in longer shows.

But Long Shows Are Popular, Aren’t They?

At the 2017 NAB Show, LibSyn VP Rob Walch showed that 84% of the biggest podcasts (those with more than 100,000 downloads) were more than 51 minutes long - while less than 10% of those popular shows were under 30 minutes. Walch says “Podcast consumers want to hit play and don’t want to have to fumble around with the device again”. This makes intuitive sense, and LibSyn is one of the biggest hosting companies, with access to a huge volume of data - but there are major flaws with this research too.

First, we’re looking at downloads, not listens, so we can’t tell what percentage of those 51+ minute shows are actually being heard. Plus, there’s the question of causality: are these podcasts popular because they’re long? Long because they’re popular? Are the two related at all? We can’t tell based on LibSyn’s data.

Takeaway: A lot of highly-downloaded podcasts happen to be long, but it’s unclear if that’s because consumers want longer shows, or if other factors are at play.

More Variety Means Shorter Attention Spans

Circling back to time spent listening, Bridge Ratings’ 2017 Podcasting Best Practices Study found a drop in TSL in recent years.