How Long Should My Podcast Be?

People ask me, "How Long Should My Podcast Be?" What is the ideal podcast length? For a while, everyone wanted to make a 20-minute podcast as that was the average commute in the US. I prefer the answer from Valerie Geller in her book Beyond Powerful Radio A Communicator's Guide to the Internet Age: News, Talk, Information which is, "There is no such thing as too long, only too boring." You can get the audiobook for free.

Longer Podcasts Are Doing Very Well

In episode 93 of Libsyn.com's The Feed Podcast, VP of Podcaster Relations Rob Walch states that at Libsyn.com

84% of shows with 100,000 downloads are 51 minutes are longer

Those that were 2.0 hours or more with 100,000 downloads per episode or more made up 13.2% of the podcasts on Libsyn.

Those that were 30 minutes or less made up 9.9% of shows.

This Doesn't Mean All Podcasts Should Be Long

The bottom line is, your podcast should be as long as it needs to be and not a minute more.

When I reverse engineered all the content I consumed, I found that the content did one or more of the following:

It made me Laugh
It made me Cry
It made me Think
It made me Grown
It Educated me
It Entertained me

If you can do more than one of these at the same time, you're on to something. If your content does not of the above, do NOT press record.

I would love to help you shape your message. I want to be your podcast consultant.