Best day to release a podcast

Akshay Datt

Founder of Unnati and host of Founder Thesis, a long-form interview podcast with company founders. Over 400 episodes since 2020.

The best day to release a podcast is a weekday you can hold every week, with the episode live before your listeners’ morning starts. Business podcasts spread their episodes almost evenly from Monday to Friday. The answer most often repeated, Tuesday at 5 AM, comes from a single 2019 comparison between different shows, and it says more about who picked that slot than about what the slot does.

A release day is the fixed weekday and hour an episode goes live in the feed, which is when podcast apps download it for subscribers and put it at the top of their list. The day decides when the episode is waiting for someone. It does not decide whether they want it.

What day do most podcasts release episodes?

Any weekday. No single day carries more than a fifth of business podcast episodes, Thursday edges ahead by a couple of points, and Saturday is close to empty.

The spread is the answer. If one weekday reliably won, the business shows still publishing would have converged on it by now. They have not. 30 Minutes to President’s Club and Marketing Against The Grain hold Tuesday and Thursday, Modern CTO and The Dave Gerhardt Show hold Monday and Thursday, Equity holds Wednesday and Friday, and Sharp Tech goes out on Fridays alone.

What the shows still publishing share is the habit of choosing and keeping. Two thirds of them put more than 80% of their episodes on the same two weekdays, and The Marketing Millennials and The Twenty Minute VC hold three. The batch publishers, BUILDERS and Marketers of Technology, drop several short interviews at once and treat the feed as a library rather than an appointment.

Is Tuesday the best day to release a podcast?

Not on the evidence behind it. The Tuesday 5 AM advice traces to a Megaphone analysis published in May 2019, covering episodes from April 2018 to March 2019 on shows drawing 1,000 to 100,000 downloads per episode.

The study compared one show’s Tuesday episodes against another show’s Friday episodes. A large show that happens to publish on Tuesday lifts the Tuesday median without Tuesday doing anything. Megaphone said so in the same analysis: proving the slot mattered would take one show changing its day and measuring the difference. That test is the one number the advice never had.

The early-morning part holds up better, because it has a mechanism behind it. The weekday part is a record of where bigger shows happened to sit in 2018.

Should you release a podcast on the weekend?

Sunday, yes, if the show is something people choose to listen to on their own time. The advice to avoid weekends is usually attributed to the same Megaphone study, which left weekends out of the analysis entirely because weekend listening behaves differently.

The three largest audiences per episode among business podcasts still publishing all belong to shows that release on Sunday. That does not make Sunday a growth lever, for the same reason Tuesday was not one in 2019. It does mean a weekend slot is not where a show goes to be ignored.

Saturday is different. Almost nobody uses it, and The Twenty Minute VC’s Saturday episode is the third slot of a show that already owns Monday and Thursday. A company show whose audience listens at work gets nothing from a weekend release that Monday morning would not give it.

What time should you release a podcast?

Before your audience’s morning, which in practice means between midnight and 6 AM in their time zone. Most business podcasts with a fixed release time go out in that window.

The reasoning is simple. An app that downloads new episodes automatically needs the file in the feed before the listener picks up the phone, and roughly half of all podcast listening happens between 6 AM and 2 PM. An episode that goes live at noon has missed the commute and arrives in the middle of the working day.

Megaphone found releases between 2 AM and 6 AM drew more downloads than those going out around midnight. That comparison has the same flaw as the Tuesday one, but here the mechanism does the arguing. The time only has to beat the first listen. Anything earlier than that is the same slot.

Equity is the one show on the list that releases late. It is a news show from TechCrunch, and it goes out once the day’s news exists.

Which time zone should a podcast release in?

The audience’s, and for a show heard on both sides of the Atlantic, the early hours Eastern. Midnight to 1 AM in New York is 5 to 6 AM in London, so a single release lands before the morning in both.

Attributed, from the Copenhagen analytics company Dreamdata, goes out at 5 AM Copenhagen time on Tuesdays. Uncensored CMO goes out at 1 AM UK time, which is 8 PM the evening before in New York. Both release in their home market’s early hours, and the second audience gets the episode early rather than late.

Schedule the release in the hosting platform at a fixed minute rather than publishing by hand. Most of these shows release at the same minute every week, which is only possible when nobody has to be awake for it.

How to pick a release day for a company podcast

Pick the slot the team can keep for three years, then stop thinking about it. The day matters far less than how many episodes a year the show sustains, and the time matters only until it is early enough.

• Start with the audience’s working week. A show for people who listen at work belongs on a weekday. A show people choose for its own sake can take Sunday.
• Set the time before their morning. Midnight to 6 AM in the main audience’s zone. Earlier than the commute is all it has to be.
• Leave room for promotion. A company show also needs the guest and the company to share it, and that happens on a working day. A Monday or Tuesday release gives the rest of the week for it.
• Fix the minute in the scheduler. The release should not depend on who is in the office.
• Test by changing one thing. If you want to know whether the day matters for your show, move it for a quarter and compare against the metrics you already track. That is the test the Tuesday study never ran.

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