Podcast Cadence – meaning the rate at which a Podcast Manager publishes every month – has a significant impact on podcast success, as we’ll discuss in this article.
There are 2 aspects to Podcast Cadence every Podcast Manager needs to know: – Cadence, meaning the actual number of podcast episodes published (on average) in a month – Cadence Consistency, meaning the consistency of this publishing schedule
At Pikkal, we find that this presents 2 challenges:
The baseline of “normal” Cadence is often guided by “pub experts” who have an opinion about what works (but no data). For example, asking a social media manager what their newsletter publishing cadence is, may anchor podcasting to a similar cadence of “Once a month is fine”. Yet, Neil Patel’s successful podcast publishes 30 episodes a month.
The conversation needs to focus more on Consistency than Cadence itself.
We’ll address these 2 challenges in this post.
We analyzed 25527 Podcast Shows and 916602 Episodes in the top 200 rankings of Apple's Business and B2B Genre. We measured (A) Cadence and (B) Standard deviation of Cadence. If a podcast is publishing episodes consistently then the standard deviation in days between published episodes is low or zero.
We analysed 627 Episodes of the top 100 Podcasts in the Business and B2B Genre. We measured the number of episodes released by Cadence. The following chart is the comparison of Cadence vs our Podcast Authority Index Top 100.
Median number of episodes published by Podcast in a month is 4, Average Number is 6.3. If we focus on the different clusters we can clearly see Podcasts in the red cluster have the best ranking overall. Average frequency of episodes of Podcasts in the Red Cluster is 5.3181 The P-value of the trend line is 0.0336 which is <0.05, this means the trend is statistically significant
The average number of episodes published a month:
The frequency of episodes has increased from 5.2772 per month in 2017 to 5.8103 in 2020. Average Cadence from 2017 to 2020 is 5.4701 The P-value of trend line is 0.00207 which is <0.05. This signifies the trend is significant. The R-Squared value of the trend line is 0.99996 which signifies that the trend is very accurate and the year 2021 onwards will most likely follow the same trend