How many true crime podcasts are there? 17,401, and 2,248 published in the last 90 days

There are 17,401 true crime podcasts in the Podcast Index, counting feeds that put True Crime as their first category. 2,248 of them published an episode in the 90 days before the dump of 16 August 2026. That is 0.37% of all 4,711,475 feeds and 0.51% of the 437,693 active ones.

A feed can list up to ten categories. 10,369 feeds name True Crime only in a later slot. Counted that way, there are 5,017 active true crime shows, 1.15% of active podcasts. The True Crime category page uses the first-category count.

12.9% of true crime feeds are active, against 9.3% of all feeds.

When true crime podcasts started

A show counts in the year of its oldest episode. The genre's big years were 2020 (3,869 new feeds) and 2021 (3,720). New launches fell to 1,437 in 2024 and came back to 1,804 in 2025. 2026 covers 1 January to 16 August.

968 true crime feeds have no first episode date and are left out of the table. In most years the true crime share still publishing is close to the share for all podcasts. The exception is the oldest group: 50 of the 259 true crime shows that started in 2018 or earlier still publish, 19.3%, against 4.1% of all podcasts that old.

Where they are hosted

Anchor (Spotify for Creators) hosts 10,095 true crime feeds, 58.0% of them, but 871 of the 2,248 active ones (38.7%). Spreaker has 253 active true crime shows, Buzzsprout 144, Omny 101 and Megaphone 96. English feeds are 1,316 of the active shows (58.5%), then Spanish (159) and German (140).

The median active true crime show carries 49 episodes, against 52 for all active podcasts (podfade), both without Buzzsprout, whose episode counts are unreliable in the dump.

For how true crime does on Apple's charts, see true crime is 0.5% of active podcasts and 7% of Apple's charts.

How we counted

Source: the Podcast Index feed dump dated 16 August 2026, every row of the podcasts table. A feed is true crime when category1 reads "True Crime"; the any-slot count checks category1 to category10. Active means the newest episode date is within 90 (or 365) days before the dump. Start year is the UTC year of oldestItemPubdate. Hosts are the feed URL's domain with platform aliases merged. Episode counts are what the feed carries now, so a show that deletes old episodes reads shorter than it was.