Which podcasts actually book guests?

The biggest shows were the most open, not the least

Every piece of advice given to new podcast guests says the same thing: start small. Big shows are unreachable, so build up through tiny ones. We expected the data to confirm it. It did the opposite.

Shows with 500 or more episodes scored an average of 59 out of 100 on openness to a cold guest pitch. Shows with fewer scored 46. Being established does not close the door. It usually means the show has a format, a publishing schedule, and a standing need for people to talk to.

The barrier is the booking desk, not the size

The real split is who runs the show. Independent shows scored 52. Shows run by a network or a media brand scored 40. A cold email to an independent host lands with the person who decides. The same email to a network show lands with a producer whose job includes not forwarding it.

Size and networks get confused because they correlate: 27% of the established shows we read are network run, against 20% across the whole set. Separate the two and the most approachable group in the entire directory is the one guests are told to avoid: the 71 big, independent shows, averaging 65. A long running show with one person’s name on it is the best cold pitch in podcasting.

Most shows tell you nothing you can check

Only 31% of the 338 feeds we read publish anything a prospective guest could verify: a named guest in a recent episode title, or a self description as an interview show. The other 69% are silent on the one question that decides whether the pitch is worth writing.

That silence is not proof a show never books guests, and we are careful not to say it is. Plenty of interview shows credit the guest in a way no parser catches. But it does mean that for two shows in three, a guest choosing where to spend a morning is guessing, and the usual response to that is to pitch the famous name instead. Which, per the finding above, is often the better bet anyway.

15% publish no route we could find

In 50 of the 338 shows whose feeds we read, we found no published way for a stranger to reach the show: no owner address in the feed, no contact or guest form on the show’s site, and nothing more specific than a homepage. That is a finding about where we looked and what the show published there, not proof that the host cannot be reached another way.

The complement of this finding is the more useful half for a guest: where the other shows do publish a route, split by kind from the same read. The short version is that the address is usually in the feed itself, which is the place most outreach advice never mentions.

Nearly a quarter of them have gone quiet

23% of the shows we read have not published in roughly six months. They are still listed, still ranked, still turn up in every “top podcasts in your niche” article, and a pitch sent to them goes nowhere. Charts do not remove a show when it stops; the only way to know is to open the feed and look at the date, which almost nobody does.

And it varies enormously by subject

Shows in Startups publish guest evidence 3 times as often as shows in Mental Health (58% against 17%). If you can speak to more than one subject, the one you lead with changes your odds before you write a word.

Method, and what this cannot tell you

We took the 360 shows in our public directory (Apple Podcasts (iTunes Search API), public directory data), fetched each one’s public RSS feed and show site, and read five things a show publishes about itself: whether recent episode titles or its own description show it books guests, how long since it last published, how often it publishes, whether the author is an independent creator or a network, and whether it publishes a route a prospective guest can use. Those five combine into a 0 to 100 openness score. 338 feeds could be read; 22 could not, and are excluded from every figure here rather than counted as absent evidence.

• This measures whether the door is the kind that opens, not whether a given host will reply to you. Nothing here predicts a response.
• A show with no guest marker in its recent titles is not proven to be guest free. Some interview shows credit guests in a format no parser catches, so we count published evidence, never its absence.
• The directory is a sample of business, technology, health and adjacent niches, not a census of all podcasts. It skews toward established shows on the Apple charts.
• The scoring is deliberately blunt and public. It is the same score our own search ranks on, and you can check any show in it yourself against the feed.

Download the data

Every figure above comes out of one table, and you can have it. 338 shows, one row each, with the four feed facts we read and the openness score we derived from them, so you can check our arithmetic, disagree with our scoring, or use it for something else entirely. Free, under CC BY 4.0: use it commercially if you like, just credit us.

Columns: slug, show_name, publisher, niche, niche_name, genre, episode_count, cadence, last_episode_at, active, publishes_guest_evidence, shows_guests, says_guests, credits_guests_in_notes, network_run, dormant, openness_score, feed_checked_at, apple_url. The guest column is called publishes_guest_evidence and not “books guests” on purpose, for the reason in the second limitation above: we can only count what a show publishes, never what it does off the feed.

Questions, a correction, or a use of the data we should know about: hello@letsmakeapodcast.com.