Shows that appear on the Apple and Spotify podcast charts are more likely to include trailers

From Podnews, an interesting bit of data about the prevalence of podcast trailers:

How many podcasts have trailers in their feeds? Podnews looked at 362,324 podcasts feeds in our sample over the last three months: just 50,096 of them (14%) have a trailer marked in their feed.

Podcast trailers can be a powerful tool in every podcaster’s toolkit. They’re a great opportunity to introduce prospective new listeners to your show. Both Apple Podcasts and Spotify give trailers prominent placement in their apps.

Yet, only 14% adoption.

Back in 2019, I looked closely at the “Top Shows” in Apple Podcasts US, and found that the higher up on the charts you go, the higher the percentage of shows with trailers.

A lot has changed since I last looked at the prevalence of podcast trailers among charting shows. So I spent a bit of time digging into the correlation between the presence of trailers and success on the charts. Here’s what I found:

Apple Podcasts

Apple Podcasts encourages podcasters to include trailer episodes, and provides helpful guidance on their Apple Podcasts for Creators website. Recent versions of the Apple Podcasts app on iOS give trailers special treatment, displaying them in their own section within a show’s listing:

Marking an episode as a trailer in Apple Podcasts is straightforward through most hosting providers, and trailers appear in RSS feeds with the <itunes:episodeType> tag set to trailer.

This makes it easy to identify which shows have trailers, and which ones don’t.

I pulled a list of “Top Shows” from Apple Podcasts US on Friday, February 3, 2023. Of the top 200 shows I looked at, 108 (or 54%) contained trailer episodes. Compared to the stat from Podnews, this suggests top-performing shows in Apple Podcasts are much more likely to contain trailer episodes than the average show.

Spotify

Podcast trailers in Spotify work a bit differently than in Apple Podcasts. According to Spotify’s help center documentation:

We automatically show the first trailer episode listed in your RSS feed. Your podcast trailer appears at the top of the episode list in the mobile Spotify app.

Podcasters can also manually choose which episode is marked as a trailer through Spotify for Podcasters. This impacts which episode gets special treatment in their mobile apps:

There’s a wrinkle when calculating the number of shows on Spotify’s podcast charts with trailers. That wrinkle: Spotify-exclusive shows that don’t have publicly-available RSS feeds.

Luckily, I was able to poke around the Spotify app enough to determine which shows have trailers specified, including Spotify exclusives like Call Her Daddy (no trailer), Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard (no trailer), and The Joe Rogan Experience (trailer).

Of the 200 Top Podcasts in Spotify US as of Friday, February 3, 2023, 101 (or 50.5%) had trailers specified.

Will a trailer episode guarantee success?

Nope.

As I wrote in 2019:

Correlation isn’t causation. Shows don’t appear on the charts because they have a trailer. And obviously, some shows reach the top of Apple’s charts without a trailer.

But trailers are often a mark of quality. A trailer tells potential new listeners that you respect their time and attention. A trailer tells directories and app-makers that you care about the listener experience.

More than half of the shows on Apple and Spotify’s charts contain trailers. Compare that to average adoption of 14%.

What’s in your trailer?