Podcastquery

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Method

Sources

  • Podcast Index feed dump, 16 August 2026. 4,711,475 rows.
  • Apple Podcasts top-100 charts, 18 storefronts, fetched 6 September 2026.

Definitions

  • Feeds: rows in the Podcast Index dump.
  • Active: newest episode within 90 days of 2026-08-16. Active 365 d is the same with a 365-day window.
  • Hosting platform: the normalised host domain of the feed URL. The alias map is in tools/count.py.
  • Cohort year: the start year. Start year is the year of the oldest episode still in the feed. A show that trims its feed to recent episodes counts under a later year than its first episode.
  • Apple top 100: the Apple Podcasts top-100 chart per storefront fetched 2026-09-06, joined to the dump on itunesId. Joined counts per country are in apple_charts.json; shares are of joined rows.

Publishing rules

  • Cells under 5 render "<5".
  • A share whose base is under 100 is not published; the cell reads "n/a".
  • episodeCount is unreliable for Buzzsprout in the dump. The Buzzsprout page shows feeds, share and active share only, and Buzzsprout rows are excluded from every median-episode table.
  • No most-episodes list is published: the dump caps episodeCount at 1,000.
  • Languages: normalised to the ISO base tag, so en-us and en-GB both count as en. The 20 languages with a page skip "(none)". The deprecated code in (101,575 feeds) is dropped rather than merged into Indonesian id.
  • Feeds with no episode date, and feeds dated before 2004, are left out of the longest-running list. A first-episode date can be backdated by a show that uploaded an older archive.

Sanity checks

MetricPodcastqueryPublic figureSourceDifference
total feeds 4,711,475 4,727,620 Podcast Index live stats 2026-09-06 -0.34%
total feeds 4,711,475 3,806,954 Listen Notes 2026-09-06 23.8%
shows published in last 30 days 314,204 328,141 Podcast Index stats 2026-09-06 (their window ends 2026-09-06, ours 2026-08-16) -4.2%
shows published in last 90 days 437,693 476,312 Podcast Index stats 2026-09-06 -8.1%
episodes (sum of episodeCount) 147,100,070 193,644,042 Listen Notes 2026-09-06 -24.0%

Source: Podcastquery, August 2026

Rebuilding the numbers

  • tools/count.py reads the dump and writes data/counts/*.json.
  • tools/fetch_apple_charts.py fetches the 18 storefront charts.
  • tools/export_lists.py writes the per-segment cuts and the list-page rows.
  • tools/rewrite_descriptions.py writes one plain sentence per listed show. Feed descriptions are never published as they came.
  • tools/weekly_refresh.sh runs all four and commits the result.