Czech podcasts in 2025: growth and survival data

Data analysis from the ceskepodcasty.cz platform shows that the Czech podcast market continued to grow in 2025, but is also changing structurally. There is more content, the activity of established projects is increasing, and new podcasts are being naturally selected. Podcasts are therefore increasingly behaving like long-term media products rather than one-off projects.

“Podcasts today behave like companies. Content is the entry point around which an ecosystem of products, relationships and formats emerges. That is why the biggest podcasters are not building one thing, but entire networks of projects. Creators are the new startups,” says Tereza Tiller from České podcasty.

Growth and professionalisation of the market are also confirmed by the data of the České podcasty platform itself. As of 1 January 2026, the catalogue lists a total of 9,029 podcasts. 3,872 of them published at least one episode last year, including 920 new podcasts that published for the first time last year.

The major change of last year is the growth in content production itself. Creators published a total of 207,676 episodes, which represents year-on-year growth of 94.4%. Content production thus grew at almost twice the rate of the number of podcasts. This suggests a shift from launching new projects to more intensive work with existing shows.

Every second podcast does not survive its first year

In 2025, 920 new podcasts were launched, and roughly half of the launched projects stopped publishing within the first year. This most often happens within 80 to 100 days of launch. The data also show that the strongest months for starting production have long been January and September, while summer and December remain the weakest periods. The first months act as a testing phase in which the long-term sustainability of the format is checked.

Of all inactive projects, 155 podcasts were deliberately ended because they were closed series. Slightly fewer, 123 podcasts, fell silent right after their first episode. “Most podcasts do not end because of a lack of audience interest. They end because they were not thought through as a long-term project,” adds Tiller.

Survival rates differ significantly across categories. Some thematic areas show high stability. New podcasts in the Religion category are the most viable, with an 83.3% survival rate. Others end much more often. The Society category, for example, has a survival rate of only 35.6%. These differences confirm that the sustainability of a podcast depends not only on its topic, but also on the type of content.

Audience attention lasts longer than the projects themselves

The platform ceskepodcasty.cz recorded a total of 3.7 million visits in 2025. Most users arrive from organic search, mainly from mobile devices, and actively look for specific topics or shows. The data thus capture audience demand at the moment of decision, not just recommendations from distribution platforms.

Based on this data, ceskepodcasty.cz published for the first time this year an overview of the Top 25 most visited podcasts of 2025 and the leaders of individual categories. The ranking shows that audience attention is not governed solely by a podcast's current activity.

Among the most visited shows are projects that no longer publish new episodes. Demand for content thus often survives the podcast itself. An example is the Potter-themed podcast Neplecha ukončena. At the same time, new projects are also among the strongest titles. The breakout of the year is the podcast Lepší už to nebude, which made it into the Top 25 within just a few months of its launch.

The data confirm that quality, relevance and long-term demand for content are decisive, not the frequency of publishing.

The market is professionalising, but it is not reaching abroad

The data also show a structural shift in the market. There are more podcasts produced as team projects with distributed roles, from dramaturgy through editing to audience work. These projects have a significantly higher chance of working over the long term than purely solo formats.

Despite growing content quality, international distribution remains a weak point of the Czech podcast market. Only a small number of projects, mainly institutional ones, systematically publish for foreign listeners. This is not a technical limit, but a strategic decision to work with content primarily locally.

“The next phase of growth rests on working with existing content, audience and distribution. AI now makes scaling beyond Czechia much easier, for example towards the German and Polish markets,” concludes Tereza Tiller from České podcasty.