Who exactly listens to podcasts today? Let's have a look first at age and influence. According to a marketing chart survey of LinkedIn members, most podcast listeners were 18 to 34 years old and at the VP or C level within their organization. Meaning, podcast listeners are young, influential and possibly more vocal than older non podcast listeners. Now let's have a look at how podcasts listeners actually consume podcasts. From the Edison Research Infinite Dial Report, 44% of podcast listeners said that they listened to most of the episode. In a later Statista survey, 34% of podcast listeners consumed up to 30 minutes of content, compared to 7% of up to 15 minutes. Meaning, unlike other forms of media podcast listeners are all in. One of the most commonly asked questions by podcast clients at our agency is how long should my podcast episodes be? And for many years, the answer lay in whoever had the loudest voice in the office, giving his opinion about how long a podcast episode should be, often that guy doesn't even listen to podcasts. And his answer is something like five minutes. But we put that answer to the test. We crunched 900,000 business podcast episodes to find out what the average episode length was and this is what we found. The average business podcast episode length is 34 minutes. However, there is a key caveat in understanding this data. There is a significant difference between the length of a long serving podcast and a newcomer. Let me explain. So long serving podcast i.e. podcasts that have tenure at least 5 years and these are podcasts, which are consistently turning out content for 5 years and successful average 43 minutes. Whereas new podcasts i.e. podcasts that have been produced or released in the last year, average 27 minutes. What does that mean? It means long-term successful podcasts publish longer episodes. But it's important to also consider the category. As our data shows the length of the podcast varies by the category in which the podcast is in and this is a key part of the planning process with any new episode and any new series is helping a client understand what the normal expectation of the audience is for your podcast category Lastly, let's talk about the qualitative nature of your podcast audience. What makes a good audience number for a business podcast? I've worked on a range of different audience numbers from let's say 300 listeners, an episode to 30,000. This goes back to comparing B2B and B2C podcasts in the last episode. As a business podcast, you can produce a successful podcast with 300 listeners. If within that 300 listener base, you have an audience of people who are high value and useful to your brand. That's why in the development stage of any new podcasts, the two criteria we need to establish to make a podcast successful is one the key business objectives of the podcast and two, what we call the Audience Avatar. 300 aligned listeners who care about what you have to talk about is far more valued than 30,000 unaligned listeners who just think your subject is interesting. A strong well-defined and well-researched Audience Avatar for any podcast series makes the return on investment and time for all those involved in the podcast a lot higher. Think of your podcast, like landing a plane. It all happens in the alignment and the approach. It's what I will illustrate in the podcast design section which will help you design a podcast, a format that works specifically for your business, for your audience and for your objectives.