How long should a podcast interview be?

We at Padverb have attended seminars, listened to conference keynote speeches, and talked to many industry insiders trying to answer this simple question (which may not be so simple after all!).?

Since everybody we asked had a different view, we decided to reframe the question this way: How long do podcast interviews tend to be, statistically speaking?

Having three PhDs and three Masters degrees between us we are known to enjoy an afternoon of good ol' number crunching.

So, we sampled about 15 thousand interview episodes currently on our platform.?

It’s worth noting upfront that the overwhelming majority of these interviews (>90%) belong to the crème-de-la-crème of the interview universe - those with 15 thousand or more downloads each.?

To give you an idea of their relative status, this simple metric places them in the top 1% of all RSS-based podcast interviews anywhere. Since these are some of the most popular (and, presumably, the best) interviews out there, we think that their hosts are doing something right –?be it length, content, or something else. Let’s focus on the length for now.

Our findings are summarized in Table 1:

As you can see from this table, 73% of interviews in our top-ranked sample did not go over 1 hour 10 minutes. There are a few outliers, of course, even among the superstar hosts, but it’s fair to say that the majority of high-profile hosts (as measured by the number of downloads) keep their interviews… well, manageable.

Again, we don't know if it is right or wrong, but for whatever reason, the high-profile folks settled on that number as the reasonable maximum, so perhaps one will do well to emulate their decision.?

Now, a great counterpart to our study would be to do a similar histogram for the interviews with the lowest downloads. Will the curve look different? What do you think??

Note: to follow your favorite interview host or guest, to listen to your own personal audio feed on your favorite mobile app (Apple, Google, Overcast, PodCruncher, etc) or (NEW!) to upload your own audio interview, sign-up on https://en.padverb.com/