Let’s Make A Podcast, a free marketplace that connects podcast hosts with guests, has published an open study of 336 podcasts that contradicts one of the most repeated pieces of advice in guest booking: that a newcomer should start by pitching small shows.
The company read the public RSS feeds of 336 podcasts on 2026-07-11 and could parse 314 of them. Each show was scored from 0 to 100 on how open it appears to a cold pitch from a stranger, using four facts drawn only from what the show itself publishes: whether it publishes any checkable evidence that it books outside guests, how recently it published, how often it publishes, and whether it is run by a network or media brand.
The headline finding runs against the standard advice. Shows with 500 or more episodes scored an average of 59 out of 100, while shows with fewer scored 49. Catalogue depth was not the barrier. The barrier was a booking desk. Shows run by a network or a media brand averaged 40, against 55 for independent shows. The most approachable cohort in the entire study was the large independent show, which averaged 65. Size and networks are easily confused because they correlate: 27 percent of the established shows we read are network run, against 21 percent across the whole set.
Two further findings matter to anyone building a pitch list.
Only 32 percent of the 314 shows publish anything a prospective guest can check that they book outside guests at all. The other 68 percent are silent on the one question that decides whether a pitch is worth writing.
23 percent have not published in roughly six months. Close to a quarter of the shows on a typical pitch list are dormant, and a pitch sent to them is wasted effort.
The study is deliberately narrow about what it claims. The scored column records what a show publishes where a listener can check it, and never what that show does off the feed. A podcast that books guests but never says so in its feed scores as though it does not. 22 of the 336 feeds could not be read and are excluded from every figure above.
The full dataset is free to reuse. It carries 314 rows, one per show, with the feed facts that were read and the openness score derived from them, along with the method and the stated limitations. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence and archived with a permanent DOI at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21310079), and mirrored at figshare. Journalists, researchers and podcast professionals are free to reuse it, including commercially, with credit.
The study is published in full, with the per-niche breakdown and the scoring method, at https://letsmakeapodcast.com/research/which-podcasts-book-guests
About Let’s Make A Podcast
Let’s Make A Podcast is a free marketplace that connects podcast hosts with the guests they book. It also publishes free, no-login tools for guests, including a searchable directory of real, currently-published shows, a pitch generator and a pitch grader. It is operated by BLRB Digital LLC, 377 Main St, West Haven, CT 06516.
Press contact: Adam Ginsberg, hello@letsmakeapodcast.com
