Will the golden age of podcasts disappear?

With so many wonderful podcasts available, we truly live in a golden age of podcasts. I love it.

There are thousands of great podcasts out there. Listeners have such a wide range of podcasts to listen to. Podcasts about general topics like current news, sports, health, or finance.

Wide selection of topics

And then there are podcasts that get into niche topics. Whatever your interest is, there’s probably a podcast that covers your topic.

Amazing!

Deep archives of episodes

Then within each podcast, they each have their own archive of episodes. A rich deep library. In some cases a podcast may have only ten episodes. But some podcasts could have hundreds of episodes in their archive.

If you subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, you potentially have access to TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EPISODES to listen to.

Whatever your tastes, there is going to be podcasts out there covering what you like. In fact, I can barely keep up with my 78 podcast subscriptions. There’s probably over 5,000 episodes in the archive I could listen to at any moment.

It’s wonderful! And it’s all free!

How can this all be free?

Advertising helps to pay some costs for some podcast creators, but how long can this go on?

In the future, what will happen to all these great podcasts? Will these episodes still be available? Eventually authors will stop creating episodes, and won’t want to pay to host them online anymore. These episodes will disappear.

With the sheer number of podcasts out there, how do people have enough time to listen to them all? Certainly there are many, many podcast creators who aren’t making enough money to support the time and production of these podcasts. Maybe in the future, there will be less podcasts available. And the golden era of podcasts will end.

There will probably always be people who make enough money on podcasts to continue to make a living off it. And certainly there are many people who do it just because it’s fun—even if there is no money in it.

I just wonder for how long we’ll have so many wonderful episodes available to us.

How will podcasts be archived for long term?

Today, we have libraries to house and store books of knowledge. But do we have anything like that for podcast episodes? A public library that stores the actual digital files?

• Archive.org stores podcast files. That’s a great resource.
• Are there other places that keeping these files for the public good? I hope so.
• I personally archive some of my favorite episodes on my own hard drive.