How often should you publish 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.

Publish weekly. Among business podcasts still running, the median show puts out 68 episodes a year, and the ones publishing twice that often have no more audience per episode to show for it. The number worth arguing about is not which day of the week. It is how many episodes you will still be making in year three.

Publishing frequency is how many episodes a show releases over a period, usually promised as a weekly slot and better measured as an annual total. A weekly slot is a rhythm. It says nothing about the weeks a show skipped, and the skipped weeks are where a schedule actually breaks.

How often do business podcasts publish?

Weekly, and faster than podcasting as a whole. Two thirds of the business shows still publishing put out at least one episode a week, the typical gap between episodes is seven days, and the spread around that runs from fourteen episodes a year to more than three a week.

Disclosure: Founder Thesis is produced by Unnati, the studio that publishes this blog.

Across everything hosted on Buzzsprout, the most common interval between episodes is eight to fourteen days, and four in ten shows publish weekly or faster. Business podcasts sit at the fast end of that distribution. A fortnightly business show is quiet for its own category even when it looks normal against podcasting in general.

A seven-day gap and a year of episodes are not the same measurement. Lenny’s Podcast and Business Breakdowns both publish a week apart, and one put out 68 episodes last year against the other’s 24. The gap describes the rhythm a show keeps while it is running, and it goes on reading seven days through the months when nothing comes out at all.

Two of the highest-output shows are not on a schedule in any usual sense. BUILDERS and Marketers of Technology release twenty-minute founder interviews in batches, three to six landing the same day, so the annual total comes from the batches rather than from a slot in the week. That is a volume play, and it answers a different question than this one.

Is weekly the right podcast schedule?

Yes, when there is a guest in the episode. A guest has to be found, approached, booked, briefed, recorded and then chased for the promotion they promised, and that pipeline sets the ceiling long before editing does. Invest Like the Best, The CMO Podcast, Attributed and Founder Thesis are all single-guest interview shows and all four sit within a handful of episodes of one a week.

Weekly also survives a bad month. A show with one slot and four conversations banked can lose a guest to a reschedule and nobody outside notices. The same show at two a week has half the buffer and twice the booking load, and finding the guests is the part that fails first.

Does publishing more often grow the audience?

No. Shows publishing twice a week or more draw a median of 459 views per episode, against 813 for the shows publishing weekly or less.

The biggest audiences are spread across the whole range of schedules. Lenny’s Podcast publishes 68 episodes a year, Acquired publishes about a dozen, and both draw tens of thousands of views on every episode. The Marketing Millennials publishes 165 and draws 46.

Listener behaviour explains the shape of it. Bumper, which reads podcast analytics for a living, found that a show releasing four to six episodes a month is played about twice a month by the average listener, and that extra episodes hit diminishing returns because a longer feed is not a bigger appetite. Publishing more often does not find new listeners. It offers the existing ones more episodes than they were going to play.

Shows publishing twice a week or more also run shorter, which is a format decision rather than a scheduling one. None of it makes the extra episode pointless. It makes it a production decision rather than a growth one, to be judged against whatever else the same hours could have produced.

Should you publish twice a week?

Only when the second episode is a different show. Most of the shows sustaining two or three a week run named strands on fixed weekdays, and the extra strand is built to be cheap.

The Marketing Millennials publishes interviews on Wednesday and Friday and a solo Bathroom Break on Monday, 10 to 13 minutes, numbered in its own series. Modern CTO alternates a 40 to 55 minute interview with a Tech Titans segment of 16 to 18, across two slots a week. Neither short strand needs a guest booked, and neither pretends to be the main show.

The harder version is two full interviews a week, which means about a hundred bookings a year. The Twenty Minute VC, 30 Minutes to President’s Club and Run the Numbers all do it, and for all three the podcast is the business rather than a marketing channel inside one.

Pick the weekdays and keep them. The Twenty Minute VC runs Monday, Thursday and Saturday. 30 Minutes to President’s Club runs Tuesday and Thursday. Equity runs Wednesday and Friday. Fixed days are what let a second strand exist at all, because Monday being one thing and Thursday another is something an audience learns without being told.

Do podcasts hold their schedule after year one?

Most do not. More than half the business shows running continuously since 2023 published fewer episodes last year than they did then, several of them far fewer.

Every show that added more than a tenth to its output started the period under a hundred episodes a year. Of the seven already publishing above a hundred in 2023, two held their level and five came down, one of them by half. High output does not compound. It gets defended, and the defence gets expensive.

Read the trajectory as a forecast of your own third year. Whatever the team hits in the first twelve months, the steady state usually sits below it, and a schedule picked at launch enthusiasm is the schedule that breaks in the quarter when everything else gets busy.

Should a podcast publish in seasons?

For a research-led show, yes. Acquired publishes about a dozen episodes a year in long, heavily researched instalments and draws an audience per episode level with the weekly shows at the top of the category. The work inside one of those episodes could not be done fifty times a year by anybody.

Seasons also change what a gap means. Three silent months in an open-ended weekly feed is the standard picture of a show nobody has cancelled yet. In a seasonal show it is the format, and the listener who liked season one comes back for season two. What makes that work is announcing it, so the gap is a scheduled break rather than an absence.

The trap is drifting into seasons without saying so. A show that quietly slows from weekly to occasional gets the silence of a seasonal show and none of the return.

What to commit to before episode one

Pick the annual number first. Decide how many episodes the team can make in a year when the quarter goes badly, divide by 52, and publish on that rhythm on a fixed weekday.

• Forty to fifty a year. One interview a week with a fortnight of slack in it. This is the standard company show and what most of the surviving ones actually do.
• Twenty-five to thirty a year. Every other week, announced as every other week. Slower, and nobody who subscribed will hold it against the show.
• A hundred or more. Two strands on two fixed weekdays, the second one short and guest-free. Budget it as two shows, because it is two shows.

Then announce the smaller number. A show that promises weekly and delivers forty has missed twelve times. A show that promises every other week and delivers forty has beaten its own schedule all year, on exactly the same work.

Frequently asked questions