“Just start”. That was the advice from Podnews editor James Cridland, speaking to budding podcasters at the Saudi Media Forum.

“Don’t worry about your first podcast not sounding great. The good news is that you will start with exactly zero listeners,” he said, “and the only way you’ll get good at your podcast is by doing one.”

Cridland’s session started with a look back at podcasting trends from the last year – the rise of AI (for editing, for voices and for research), YouTube’s impact on podcasting in the last year, and that of Spotify’s more recent announcements.

Sharing the latest top 10 podcasts in the US, Cridland highlighted the similarities of all ten. All have been going at least three years – most for more than eight years. All are either interviews, true crime, or short-form stories like This American Life. And all are available everywhere, and are not exclusive to one platform.

Cridland then shared data from podcast analysis tool OP3. Popular apps, he said, were different in every country, highlighting the benefit of making sure your podcast is on as many platforms as possible. In one slide he shared download figures for a number of countries, including Australia and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where Apple Podcasts has a 45% share of all downloads, and Spotify only gets 20%.

Cridland finished by posting a number of questions of what to think about when launching a new show. Questions like “Why is your podcast there, and who is it for?” pointed to a need for a clear focus for potential listeners as to why they should listen and the focus of the podcast, while other questions about consistency and workflow were about the mechanics of producing regular podcast episodes.

“Most podcasts fail before their fifth episode, because people find out that it’s harder than they think,” he said; but he was keen to point out that even more fail before they’ve even got going.

“The best way to start a podcast? Just start,” he added.