EarBuds Podcast Collective Newsletter Reveals 9th Anniversary Survey Results, Highlighting Podcast Discovery Insights
Press Release ·
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.
This is a press release which we link to from Podnews, our daily newsletter about podcasting and on-demand. We may make small edits for editorial reasons.