Live from Podcasts We Text About, It’s Lauren & Arielle (Here’s a recap)
If you choose to watch the video attached to this post, you will notice immediately that there were two camera angles of Arielle for a minute (don’t ask). We start off with some light NPR-core nostalgia. Then we got into a lot of extremely inside-baseball podcast talk. Whether you watch or just read this post, here’s a recap of our conversation…
Our goal was simple. We wanted to talk through our latest post (find it here) and answer some questions, such as:
Do these lists actually matter?
Which shows were overhyped?
Which shows totally crushed it on the marketing side of things?
Which shows do we demand you listen to and then come back here to talk with us about them?
Would you rather be listed as a show of the year or win a podcast award?
When is the optimal time to launch a podcast in order to secure best-of list placement?
Lots more.
How This List Came Together
Lauren Passell has been tracking “best of podcast” lists for years (shoutout to Galen Beebe and Bello Collective, forever influential). For this piece, we pulled together 24 different year-end lists — big publications, indie critics, newsletters, blogs — and tallied which shows appeared most often.
Then, we looked for patterns among them and presented them via charts and graphs like these:
These shows floated to the top:
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, Heavyweight, Good Hang with Amy Poehler, The Retrievals Season 2, Embedded: Alternate Realities, Camp Swamp Road, Wisecrack, Sea of Lies, Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer, and Pablo Torre Finds Out. Some of the shows listed above were limited series, some ongoing, some brand new, some revivals.
Do “Best Of” Lists Grow Your Show?
Being on a best-of list doesn’t necessarily move the download needle in a dramatic way for creators.
But it does help with:
Long-term SEO
Industry credibility
Getting your next project green lit (Dan Taberski told us this outright with his show, Hysteria)
Awards and lists aren’t total hype and no substance, they’re just not growth hacks. If you’re an indie creator spending your last dollars chasing trophies, that’s worth rethinking. If you’re playing a long game around reputation, press, and future opportunities, that can be a different story.
Patterns That Stood Out To Us
A few things surprised us when we visualized the data:
Genres were narrow: Society & Culture and True Crime dominated
New shows did well: ~half of the top shows were new in 2025
Feeds matter: several of the showed mentioned most frequently were launched inside existing feeds (Embedded, Serial, Uncover)
Geographical spread was LIMITED: 9 out of 10 top shows were U.S.-produced
The Creator Takeaway
There were a few takeaways we landed on:
Timing matters
Launching a show in November means the show has to BE SO GOOD and have an AMAZING marketing campaign in order to make it to next year’s lists
Ongoing shows benefit differently than limited series
We need more podcast writers to show up beyond the best-of roundups! It’s awesome when November / December rolls around and we see these huge publications writing about podcasts, but it’d be groovy if this attention to podcasting extended beyond.
Shoutout to our fellow podcast and culture writers who keep it going year round:
Samantha Hodder’s Bingeworthy
Keelin’s Mentally a Magpie
Kattie Laur’s Pod The North
Miriam Tinberg’s Open In a New Tab
AND MORE
More things we mentioned:
Proxy with Yowei Shaw
Thank you for reading and watching and listening and then coming back and letting us know what you listened to (leave a comment). We’re going to do more of these lives. With fewer camera angles, hopefully.
💌Lauren & Arielle
Thank you Rik Boey, Ben Robins | Sound Insights, Keelin, The 5RQ Companion, ChadP, and many others for tuning into our live video with Lauren Passell and Arielle Nissenblatt🎧!
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