A wise woman once told me that if you have a secret that you don’t want anyone to know about, the best place to hide it is in a podcast that lasts longer than an hour. There’s something about seeing an episode timestamp in hours rather than minutes that puts listeners off, or so the theory goes.
Tightly-edited, well-paced shows of around 30 minutes stand a much better chance of attracting an audience, we are told. It makes sense – as I’ve mentioned before when discussing podcasting’s “discovery” problem, potential listeners surely need to hear at least half of an episode before they can be sure whether they want to start downloading the show regularly. It follows that the smaller that initial time investment is, the easier it will be to attract new listeners. Two of my favourite shows from the US-based collective Radiotopia – The Allusionist and Song Exploder – almost never put out episodes that are longer than half an hour, and mostly they clock in between 15 and 25 minutes.
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