Just six years ago, only 1% of the UK listened to podcasts weekly, with the US being further ahead of the curve at 10%. Now it’s a quarter of the population for the UK and 28% for the US, with 2021 seeing the biggest year-on-year increases for the period studied.

With these surveys carried out in the spring, 2021’s number reflects the world since the pandemic shook everything up. If you felt you listened to more podcasts during the pandemic, this data shows you certainly weren’t alone.

In the US, of those who listened to weekly podcasts, 54% listened to three or more of them. There is clearly a huge appetite for this format, and the US and UK are by no means the exceptions.

According to the Reuters Institute, when looking at monthly podcast listening, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and Norway all consume more podcast content than the US. Meanwhile the UK ranks another 14 countries below them.

But while podcast popularity seems to be on the up, according to our research, the number of people creating or promoting their own is on the decline in 2021.

Having said that, this decline comes after a surge in 2020 as the pandemic was declared which we reported on at the time. This increase remained throughout 2020, with the start of 2021 seeing the usual seasonal jump in podcast creation and promotion.

But after that things have been going downhill, with mentions in July 2021 down 19% year-on-year. However, they’re still way above 2019 levels, so let’s not get too hasty about any ‘death of the podcast’ predictions just yet.

What’s causing the fall then? As always there won’t be one single reason, but we can presume that where lockdowns and restrictions have been lifted, and with vaccinations making people feel safer getting out and about, many just don’t have the time to work on podcasts any more. For those who struggled to build an audience over the last year, they may see now as a good time to call it quits, too.

While there’s certainly no lack of podcasts, you may get less DMs from your friends asking you to listen to their three-hour-long discussions about post-modern interpretations of the Rambo movie franchise. We’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing or not.

To finish off our analysis, we wanted to see if the kinds of podcasts people were creating had changed since 2019. To do this, we looked at our podcast creator/promotion conversation and ranked each category by the amount of mentions it got.

For the most part, the categories have remained fairly steady. TV and film and music podcasts have been hugely popular throughout, with comedy and tech ones languishing at the other end of the scale.

The popularity of sports podcasts fluctuated the most, going from 5th to 2nd to 6th. Weirdly, they were most popular when most major sports events were called off. Why?

Maybe this comes back to free time again. Sure, there wasn’t much sport going on, but that left a lot of sports fans twiddling their thumbs. And what do sports fans do if they’re not watching sports? They talk about it, and, in 2020’s case, a lot of them recorded the act too.

With major sporting events having returned, it seems fans have packed away their microphones. Again, we’ll let you balance out the positives and negatives of that.

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The Brandwatch React team