How long is the perfect podcast?

How many podcasts do you listen to? If you listen to podcast weekly like I do, then according to Edisson Research, you listen to about 5 podcasts per week. That represents a good chunk of time. On average, I listen to about 3 hours of podcast a week (depending on how long it takes to put my kids to bed:-)).

The podcasts I listen to are mostly an hour long with a few in the 30 minutes range. Yet, I wish they were all shorter. But I’m only one person. What do others think and most importantly, what do listeners want?

• According to Daniel J. Lewis, the perfect length is 25 minutes. His estimate is based on the duration of activities you might do while listening to a podcast (workout, commute, etc). Those are about 25 minutes long.
• According to Shea Bennet, it’s 22 minutes (or so said the penguin), listeners are tuning out after that.
• According to IDG content, it’s 16 minutes. This is based on a podcast listener survey asking what the ideal length is.

There are plenty of other articles where you’ll find other estimates. But most importantly, you’ll find plenty of advice directing you to do what works for your audience and to make it as long as you have great content for. Which is probably the best answer.

But those answers lead to two big questions. How do you know what works for your audience? How do you know which isn’t great enough and should be edited out?

You can use surveys. You simply ask your audience to go to your site and fill in your survey. According to SurveyGizmo, 10 to 15% is a good response rate for an external survey. But you probably know that even that is hard to reach.

You can rely on the feedback you get from your fans on your Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Though I’m not sure if anyone will let you know that they skip out early. From chatting with podcasters, very rarely do they get feedback about the episode length (good or bad). In addition, the feedback will only come from regular listeners, what about your potential new listeners which listen to your show for the first time? They will most likely never give you feedback.

Another issue with surveys and fans feedback is sometime referred to as “say vs do”. I’ll show a little bit of my background here by linking a Jakob Nielsen article. You will find that asking your listeners what they want is most likely a bad idea. People will tell you they want X, but then choose Y.

That is probably a bad sign for that 16 minutes estimate that I gave earlier, given that it was based on what listener said they wanted. For exemple, most of the podcast I listen to are about an hour long. Yet, I’d like shorter podcast, though I am not subscribed to any shorter podcasts…

So how do you tell what your listeners do? You can install Audience by podTrack.io on your website. Audience will show you when your listeners are tuning out. Audience will not tell you why they are tuning out, or how to capture their attention back. But it will highlight that something needs to happen. This is where your creative genius will kick in. You’ll create even better content to engage your audience and keep then on the edge of their ear buds to the end of your podcast.

Any other way to crack that nut? If so, tweet at me at @podtrackio, or send me a message on Facebook.

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I also publish on medium.com.