Podcast Amplify attrition report
We read 188,457 podcast RSS feeds found by searching for a topic. 5.9% have not published an episode in over a year. Among the 15,006 shows we found in Apple's genre charts instead, only 8.8% have. Same medium, same week, two completely different pictures, depending only on how you go looking.
Computed live from our database, 21 October 2026, 23:52 UTC.
That gap is the finding. A Top chart can only ever show you shows that are currently ranking, so it is incapable of showing you attrition. Search the same platform by subject and you get the shows nobody is listening to any more, still listed, still recommendable, still carrying a contact address that nobody reads.
5,947 of them have been silent for more than two years.
The strongest predictor of whether a podcast is still alive is simply how many episodes it made. Of shows that never got past three, 72.1% are dead. Of shows that passed a hundred, 3.0% are.
Search-discovered cohort, 188,457 feeds. Dead = no episode in 365 days.
The average living podcast here has published 109 episodes. The average dead one managed 54.
Crypto and AI, the two fastest-growing subjects in podcasting, are also the two that quit most. A plausible reading is who starts them: a show launched to ride a market stops when the market moves, while shows launched by practitioners with a business behind them keep publishing, because the podcast is not the product.
Read this chart with the method in mind. Our search terms are weighted towards business and technology, so these subjects are sampled far more heavily than health or culture. The comparison between subjects is sound. The mix is not representative of podcasting as a whole, and we have not corrected for it.
The most recent year is always understated: a show that went quiet a few months ago has not yet crossed the twelve-month line.
Of the 86,893 searchable shows that publish their own contact address, 7.5% are dead. Buy a podcast contact list and better than a third of it is people who stopped podcasting, sometimes years ago. They will not reply, and a better subject line will not change that.
This is also why we check. Our own directory filters on recent publishing before a show is offered as a pitch target, because an opportunity that cannot answer is not an opportunity.
We hold podcasts for which we have read the show's own RSS feed and recorded the publication date of its most recent episode. Nothing here uses platform-reported figures. Dead means no new episode for 365 days or more. Every number recomputes when this page loads.
Shows reached our directory by three routes, and they do not measure the same thing:
An earlier version of this page blended the two and quoted the average. That average described no real population, and we have corrected it.
The 164 search terms were chosen for a commercial directory, not for a survey. 117 of them, 71%, cover business, technology, crypto and marketing. Health has five terms, lifestyle five, culture seven. We have therefore heavily oversampled the subjects our own data shows die fastest, and undersampled the most durable ones. Read the headline as the attrition rate among business-and-technology-leaning podcasts findable by topic search, which is what it is, and not as a figure for podcasting as a whole.
A feed that moved host without a redirect looks dead when it is not. A seasonal show on a long break between series is counted as dead. Shows never listed anywhere we look are absent entirely. The sample skews English-language, and the storefronts crawled are Great Britain, the United States, Ireland, Australia and Canada.
Suggested citation. Podcast Amplify, Podcast attrition report, 2026. podcastamplify.co.uk/dead-podcasts/
These figures are free to quote with attribution and a link to this page. If you are writing about this and want a cut we have not published, by country, cadence, or subject in more detail, ask and we will run it, usually the same day.