What 62 Podcast listeners reveal about discovery (and why clicks don’t tell the full story)
EarBuds at 9: What 62 Podcast Listeners Shared About Discovery, Curation, and Behavior – After 9 years of running a weekly podcast newsletter, EarBuds Podcast Collective – led by founder Arielle Nissenblatt – surveyed its audience to better understand how people engage with recommendations: what emails they open, what they click, how they discover, and more.
A few topline takeaways:
People don’t open every issue of the newsletter, by design?: about half of respondents open every issue, while a large portion open only when a theme interests them. EarBuds is built around themed curation, and readers are engaging selectively.
Recommendations drive readership, but personal voice is key: podcast recommendations are the primary draw, but “notes from the editor” ranked as the second most popular segment, highlighting a growing appetite for context, perspective, and personality alongside lists.
Discovery is happening, but attribution is unclear: only about a third of respondents said they’ve discovered a podcast they now regularly listen to via EarBuds, while nearly half said they “can’t recall.” In other words: discovery works, but people don’t always remember how.
Clicks don’t tell the full story: the most common action readers take when they see a show they’re interested in isn’t clicking a link, it’s opening their app and searching for it.
This suggests that newsletters function more as touchpoints than direct conversion drivers.
The product is dialed in: respondents overwhelmingly said the newsletter’s layout and length are “just right,” reinforcing that the current format works, and that future changes will be iterative, not structural.
There’s demand for more niche recommendations: readers expressed interest in more topic-specific recommendations (history, fiction, true crime), even though EarBuds has already launched spinoff newsletters in many of these categories, pointing to a discoverability gap within the product itself.
The survey included 62 responses from highly engaged readers. While not statistically significant, the findings offer a useful look at how podcast listeners actually behave when interacting with curated recommendations.
See the full survey results and analysis here:
https://canva.link/earbudsat9survey
