Should my podcast take a holiday break? Here's what the numbers say.
Around this time of year, I often hear these types of questions:
“Should our podcast take a holiday break?”
“Is it a bad idea to publish a new episode on December 25?”
”Will my audience disappear between Christmas and New Year’s Day?”
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions. Every show is different, and every audience has different expectations and behaviours.
At Bumper, we believe in equipping podcasters with data to inform editorial, publishing, and marketing decisions. So we partnered with the team at Simplecast and a few of our favourite podcasters to spotlight holiday podcast supply and demand trends.
Supply: new episode releases
In order to understand holiday listening, we need to start with supply. One way to gauge this is by measuring the number of episodes published per day.
I pulled a sample of 988,235 podcast episodes published in December 2021 from Apple Podcasts, then broke them down by release date. I’ve highlighted December 25 onward in red:
That’s a pretty noticeable dip in new episodes released the final week of December.
To sniff-test this, I asked the team at Simplecast for their perspective. They have a great vantage point on the industry, given their role as a podcast hosting and analytics service, powering SiriusXM and other major podcasting networks. Simplecast shared episode publishing volume on their platform for the same period of December 2021, and the shape looks very familiar:
It seems pretty clear: fewer podcast episodes are released in late December.
You might see this as rationale to take a short hiatus. That’s fine. You might also see this as an opportunity to make some noise during an otherwise quiet time of the year. That’s also fine.
But remember: just because fewer episodes are published in late December doesn’t necessarily mean there’s less podcast consumption. So let’s turn our attention to podcast demand.
Demand: downloads
Podcast supply and demand are inherently interrelated. Remember:
Popular listening apps like Apple Podcasts automatically download new episodes
The simple act of publishing an episode usually triggers downloads, but those downloads might never be played. In other words, supply can trigger the appearance of demand.
Once again, the team at Simplecast were extremely helpful in sharing their vantage point. They identified a podcast that published regularly throughout December 2021, and shared its relative daily download performance for the month. Solid columns represent days where the show published.
The consistency of daily downloads is striking, though perhaps unsurprising.
The challenge here: download numbers alone can’t tell us whether human beings listened to anything. To go beyond the download and better understand holiday podcast consumption behaviour, we need to check directly with listening apps.
Demand: starts, streams, and plays
Services like Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters can help podcasters better understand how audiences consume their shows. Rather than looking exclusively at downloads, these dashboards give podcasters a glimpse at actual listening behaviour.
All Ears English
I reached out to the team at All Ears English, a popular language-learning podcast with a global audience. All Ears English published episodes consistently throughout December 2021, and host Lindsay McMahon was kind enough to let us share her Apple Podcasts relative daily play counts for the months of December 2021 and January 2022.
Remember: these are plays, not downloads, and typically correspond to human beings hitting a play button:
It’s clear: for Lindsay’s audience, plays soften a bit during the last week of December, then pick right back up in the new year.
Radio Headspace
I was curious about other regularly-publishing shows, so I asked the team at Headspace Studios about their daily show Radio Headspace. They saw a very similar pattern from December 2021 to January 2022:
Again, we see softening in the back end of December, followed by a jump back to regular listening levels in early January.
What am I supposed to do with this information?
Your reaction to this data is a bit like a Rorschach test. You can see in it what you want: an excuse to skip a week, or an opportunity to try and stand out from the crowd during an otherwise quiet period.
Some podcasters take a short hiatus. Others release special holiday messages in their feeds. On my show Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, we knew that many members of our audience would be traveling to their childhood homes over the holidays, so we always made sure to send a holiday-timed message to our email newsletter, encouraging them to dig up their own juvenilia. Every show is different.
If you decide to release podcast episodes in late December, know that:
It’s a quieter, less crowded time of year
Your downloads will likely soften a bit
Actual consumption (plays, streams, starts) will likely be lower than other times of the year
There’s no one-sized-fits-all advice here. Do what’s right for you, your show, and your audience.