Why counting podcasts no longer makes sense

Five years ago, I did a research project trying to estimate how many podcasts were being launched in Russian.

In English-speaking markets, there were already aggregators like Podcast Index constantly tracking the number of new shows. But for the Russian-language market, there was almost no reliable data. So it felt important — a way to understand the actual state of the industry.

The logic seemed straightforward: if lots of new projects keep appearing, podcasting is growing. If not, it’s stagnating.

But today, this metric — in Russian, English, or any other language — no longer tells us much about the health of the industry.

Because roughly 40% of all newly launched podcasts are now AI-generated. At least in English-speaking markets for now, but the same trend will inevitably spread elsewhere.

There are entire companies built around mass-producing AI content. Inception Point AI, for example, reportedly operates tens of thousands of active shows.

The problem with this wave of AI slop — beyond the obvious quality concerns — is that it no longer correlates with the number of actual creators, audience demand, or cultural interest in podcasting itself.

It’s essentially a speculative bubble: content generated at scale in the hope of capturing even a tiny slice of audience attention.

Most of these podcasts have extremely low ratings and engagement (though there are exceptions). So I’m not ready to declare that AI will replace podcasters anytime soon. But it already makes many of our traditional ways of measuring the market far less meaningful than they used to be.