One question not asked is: how many podcasts can there be? If regular years recently have seen ~250K new podcasts, and 2020 saw a million, that means that there

One question not asked is: how many podcasts can there be? If regular years recently have seen ~250K new podcasts, and 2020 saw a million, that means that there might be as many as 5 million podcasts created throughout history. Do that many people have that much to say? Or looking at it from the other side: are there that many people who listen to podcasts? If you take 500 listeners as a bound of "podcasts with such low listenership that they are at risk of ending" and suppose that the average person listens to 5 podcasts regularly, then you need 100 million podcast listeners just to sustain 1 million podcasts. Again, are that many people listening? Slicing it yet another way, if the average podcast lasts for 3 years, then at present rates that means there are ~600K active podcasts at any one time. There should obviously be a flow of old podcasts ending and new ones springing up to take their place. But it seems unlikely that 600K individual podcasts is sustainable.