The incredible shrinking podcast industry | Semafor:

dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically

Downloads are podcasting’s version of social followers or email subscribers, an empty metric on its own.

The reason these numbers still “matter” is because the outdated traditional advertising value measurement of raw reach is still around.