Should You Take a Break from Podcasting Over the Holidays? Here's What the Data Says
As the festive season approaches, the question of whether to take a break from releasing podcast episodes over Christmas and New Year often looms large, especially for podcasters.
It's a time when many are eager to unwind, enjoy family time, and perhaps forget about their usual routines. But is a break the best move for your podcast? I’ve trawled through the data we collect from our own client roster and the podcasting industry more broadly to give you my take.
Should You Pause Your Podcast?
The short answer? No, I don’t think it’s necessary. I know it’s tempting to turn off your mics and enjoy the holiday spirit without thinking about your next episode. But the data shows there is only an 8% drop in listenership in December and the work you put into December episodes impact the magic that is January. That’s when our stats show an impressive rise in listenership—circling between 20% to 30%. This January surge is an opportunity for your episodes to get more attention than usual and expose your show to a larger audience ready to binge.
Planning Makes It All Possible
Planning is your ticket to a seamless holiday season and podcasting continuity. Batching content is a lifesaver, allowing you to have a presence without sacrificing your well-deserved break. At Bamby Media, we offer a Podcast Content Calendar service to get you over the slump of trying to think of new content ideas. This helps you schedule and batch episodes that listeners can binge on in January. The Podcast Content Calendar is useful whenever you hit a creative wall, so feel free to book in whenever it suits you.
We’ve found that ChatGPT only gets you so far in your content planning before you really need a more tailored approach. We analyse your show, existing data, and current trends to craft unique content ideas and then record a video for you on how to implement the schedule.
The Podcasting Landscape: A Growing Opportunity
Podcasting hasn’t just found its place; it’s flourishing. With over 51% of Americans and 8.2 million Australians listening to podcasts regularly, this is a vibrant time to be part of the podcasting community. People are looking for content that is more nuanced than the quick scrollable feeds social media offers. They seek niche topics and in-depth conversations—exactly what podcasts deliver.
I found this article and episode by Scott Galloway to be particularly interesting as he discussed the impact podcasting had on the recent 2024 US Election. It is clear to me that podcasting has become one of the most influential forms of mainstream media we have today.
Recasting Older Episodes
Staying active over the holidays doesn’t mean you must sacrifice all your downtime. Re-release older, popular episodes—recasts help you stay present even when you want a break.
I know that taking time off is important, and with strategic planning, you can ensure both you and your podcast editor or producer get some much-needed rest, all while maintaining your podcast’s momentum.
Podcasting is an evolving and growing medium, drawing people away from algorithm-driven platforms to more meaningful interactions with the content they love. By staying consistent, especially over the Christmas period, you'll be ready to leap into the New Year, taking advantage of the increased listener engagement.
I hope this gives you the clarity and confidence to keep those episodes rolling, even through the holiday season. I know it’s a lot of work, and I also appreciate that you simply might need a break.
It’s okay if you don’t take my advice and instead fall in a heap for a couple of weeks. I get it.
At the end of the day, it’s your show so you can do whatever you want. That’s the beauty of the medium. I’m just here to give you a bit of a push if you’re open to it.
Transcript:
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[00:00:00] Brianna: Should you take a break from releasing podcast episodes over the Christmas and New Year period? That is a question that I'm going to answer for you here today. Welcome to my face. My name is Brianna. I'm the head honcho here at Bambi Media, and we are a podcast and video production company based in Australia.
[00:00:19] I've been doing it a long time. Long time, my friends, a long time. If you want to know the origin story, it's on the YouTube channel and on the podcast. You can get a feel for who I am from there. Let's get stuck into what I want to discuss today, which is, should you take a break? And my short answer is no.
[00:00:38] That's it. Yep. Turn it off. That's the end of the episode. No. For a little bit of context, so we have a lot of clients. We've been tracking the data on these clients for a long time. We track every month how they perform, so that we can get a feel for whether there's any particular months that outperform others or where things are a little low.
[00:00:57] And then at the end of the year, we send an email to our clients and say, Hey, this is what you should do based on the data that we've collected. Here we go. Number one, a lot of people take a break in December. Therefore, the data shows that listenership drops in December because Partly, a lot of people are taking a break in December, so there's physically less episodes, there's physically less videos coming out, therefore consumption is sometimes lower as a result of that.
[00:01:26] But that's kind of only one part of the story there. The other part is, yes, there is less people consuming at certain periods of December. And from my data that we have here, it's about a two week period from 16th ish of December through to the 30th of December. You've got a section there where December drops about 8 percent in actual listenership.
[00:01:51] 8 percent doesn't feel like a hell of a lot to me. Doesn't make me want to stop releasing over that period for a small drop of 8%. And especially [00:02:00] because of what happens. In January, January has a increased listenership of around 20 to 30 percent above the average. What that means is, is that if you haven't taken a break in December, if you've continued to release, although yes, you may have less listenership in December, they're going to binge it.
[00:02:21] in January. Because that's when they're actually having more time to themselves. They've done all the Christmas running around. Then it gets to January and maybe they're on holidays. Maybe they've got their kids in like some school camp things. They've got just a bit more time to themselves. They haven't started back at work yet and they're looking to consume.
[00:02:40] And we want to get these people off social media. We want to get them onto podcasts where they can engage in a much healthier way, where it's good for the soul. I think this is when people are listening a lot. And so if you've done your releases in December, they can binge them in January. It's fine to take a break in December and then just do your January releases, but you'll get the most reward bang for your buck from doing the December as well.
[00:03:07] Cause then you've got stack of December, uh, End January episodes and they can binge. So that's why I think that it is important to still release over that period so that you are catching the January hype. What that looks like though is batching your content. So you want to take a break, that makes sense.
[00:03:27] That's what I'm doing here right now. I'm batching content for the Bambi Media YouTube channel for our podcast, Pump Up Your Pod. It's important to have some structure around what you're thinking of recording and make it possible for yourself to take a break but still release. Batching is the way to do that.
[00:03:43] We can help you batch by providing you with a content planning calendar. This is where we listen to your show. We collect some data on your show. If you're a client, obviously it's a little bit easier because we have some data from you already. We look at what you've already [00:04:00] released. We look at the data, we look at the research, we look at what's trending and we put together a plan.
[00:04:04] together 12 to 15 podcast episodes with titles and give you a bit of a plan as to what you could record moving into the next stage. So this can be done at any time. It doesn't need to be over the December and January period, but it is a content planning calendar that people seem to enjoy getting because it takes the guesswork out of it.
[00:04:24] And yeah, you can put that information into chat GPT, you know, ask chat GPT to give you a bunch of content ideas, but a lot of the time it gives you content you've already done. And it gives you really generic stuff, whereas with us, what we do is, yeah, we might use some AI tools to help us kind of get there a little bit, but we also have other tools that we look at that actually make it more possible for us to be really tailored and customized to what we think is actually going to work for us.
[00:04:51] For your show for your audience. So that's a good thing to do at any stage, certainly around this period. If you're struggling, that's something that you can get us to help you with. And there will be a link to book one of those in turnaround time on that is seven days. So that's what I think there. I think that it's important for you to know that you can batch that you should batch, that you need to get yourself organized, that you need to have a bit of a structured plan as to what you're wanting to release.
[00:05:18] In saying that, whoever's editing your show obviously also needs ample time to edit the show in time for those things to be released. For us here at Bambi Media, just to give you a little bit of an idea as to how it flows, at the end of October or very start of November, we actually send this email out where I give them all that information and I say, hey, our cutoff date is this.
[00:05:40] From a production point of view, you need to have all your episodes that you're going to release through. the next four to five weeks to us by x date so that we can have them done so that we also get to have a break as well because your poor producers also want to have time off. Oh, and it is [00:06:00] important for everybody to have some time off, but batching is the way to do it.
[00:06:04] Why am I like harping on about the fact that I don't think you should take a break? Firstly, I've just mentioned, 8 percent isn't a huge drop, 20 30 percent that you're going to get in January, February is going to be good as well, makes it worthwhile to me personally, that makes the most sense. But more broadly, the podcasting industry is still exploding, okay?
[00:06:24] It has not hit the peak. It is still growing. We now have podcasting in the mainstream in the U. S. 51 percent of people now listen to podcasts regularly in the U. S. That's huge and has never happened before, thanks to Sounds Profitable for actually providing that. Data in their podcasting state of the industry for 2024 as well.
[00:06:47] I'm going to link to that research so that you can look at it in full. There's so much good stuff in there that makes you just go. Yes, podcasting is growing. It's a very interesting amount of data that they've collected there. And I just love, I love that they do that. And then we've also got pod poll by dead set studios and insightfully, They collected information as well on how the Australian market is going.
[00:07:12] And we've got 8. 2 million Australians now listening to podcasts regularly as well. This is all stuff that just has never happened before. This is a really exciting time to be in podcasting. And so if you can leverage this medium, because you're already there, you're already doing it, you're already creating really great content.
[00:07:32] Don't take a break. Batch. Get in on some trends, perhaps. Plan your content in advance, maybe get us to do a content planning schedule for you. And then if you also look at how things are growing, Spotify, even with the announcement just recently, where you can now upload video to Spotify, there's this like new Spotify content.
[00:07:51] Create a program that they're releasing, which is trying to rival YouTube, which I don't think really rivals it. And I'll do a separate video on why that's the case, why I [00:08:00] think it kind of sucks, but Spotify is now outperforming Apple podcasts and YouTube is the number one way still in Australia that most people consume podcasts.
[00:08:10] It's huge in the U S. And even if you just zoom out a little bit and think about how many podcasts the presidential nominees went on during this most recent election, it's really proving that podcasting as a medium is not going anywhere. It's a medium that people trust. Joe Rogan had Donald Trump on his show for like over three hours.
[00:08:31] Cool Her Daddy had Kamala Harris on her show as well, which is, you know, one of the biggest female audiences as well. So it's just proving again, further, people are listening to podcasts, people want to consume podcasts, people are moving a little bit more away from the algorithmic social media kind of platform scrolling business.
[00:08:51] And they're wanting to consume more in depth stuff, more niche topics, more things that they go and source and find themselves on topics that they're interested in. Podcasting is where they do that. There is also a very interesting article that I will link to that Scott Galloway did, who's a fantastic podcaster has been in the space for a long time.
[00:09:10] And he was kind of referencing the fact that podcasting is still growing, that it is a huge mainstream industry. And he even referenced kind of how much money they're bringing in from the podcast as well. Although it's good to take a break. I don't think it's great to take a break right now in podcasting.
[00:09:29] I think that batching is the way to do it. I think that you can achieve it with a little bit of content planning, with a bit of a schedule, with a bit of an idea as to what you're going to do, who you're trying to reach, and you can see the rewards. You can reap the rewards of what happens in January from the work that you put into December.
[00:09:46] That is my wrap up of what I think you should do for your podcast for the Christmas period. If you want a consultation with us, you can absolutely book them in. There is a consultation link in the [00:10:00] description below. So we have video troubleshooting consults. We have high level strategy consults. We have video.
[00:10:06] Business consults. If you are a podcast, professional podcast, industry person, yourself, you're looking to grow your agency similar to what I have done, then we have those kinds of consults as well. We've got consults out the wazoo. And then we also have our podcast production and video production services as well.
[00:10:22] If you're looking for something like that, we don't take on a lot of clients, but certainly we love hearing from people and it is something that we can assess at the time as well. So I hope that was helpful. Go forth. Bye. Batch some content. Please keep releasing. You're going to benefit from it. If you really need to take a break, just recast some old episodes, recast some episodes that went well for 2024, maybe, or even some older ones that you've got data on that you can see.
[00:10:52] These ones actually had a really good listenership at that point. You can recast them. That's also good. As long as you're releasing something on podcast channels, you'll still get a little bit of an up kick from that. Thanks for listening, like, subscribe, do the things that people want you to do on podcast and YouTube channels.
[00:11:13] Have a great day.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Podcast Landscape 2024 - Sounds Profitable
The Podcast Election - Scott Galloway
BAMBY MEDIA LINKS:
GEAR WE USE HERE AT BAMBY MEDIA:
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