Pressing records was not the plan.
Last November, I was at Inside higher education About the expanding opportunities for scholars and mission-driven organizations to embrace audio. according to electronic marketerU.S. adults spend approximately 21% of their media time with audio, but brands invest only approximately 4% of their advertising budgets into it. This gap is a missed opportunity and a signal to communicators and institutions ready to build real loyalty through voice.
Since that article was published, I We’re seeing more and more teams begin to recognize and implement audio as an important channel for integrating important ideas into culture. University centers, institutes, and nonprofit organizations are launching programs, and some are even establishing podcast “networks.” HighEdPods is a higher education podcast community with 133 members and a directory listing 1,205 podcasts from 210 colleges and universities. This is great and should definitely happen.
But the podcast boom has also created a new problem: It’s increasingly becoming a one percenter’s game. A small group of shows attracts the majority of listeners, while others compete for the remaining attention. You can see this in higher education’s own backyard. Click on the “Podcasts by Popularity” tab on HigherEdPods and you’ll see mostly celebrity science and psychology shows –huberman laboratory, Happiness Lab, Adam Grant’s work life, no stupid questions— and the usual institutional skeptics, with the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and other major brands at the top of the list. (One pleasant outlier in the top 20 is History is not badadministered by Integrated Studies Fellows at Utah Valley University, a regional public school in my home state of Utah. )
This pattern is not unique to higher education. as Axios’s 2025 Media Trends report states that top creators across formats are receiving disproportionate engagement.
The traditional advice for building a podcast audience is to “just stick with it” – release weekly or quarterly, and expect to take 50 to 100 episodes before you start to build an audience. This might be good advice for someone whose main product is an independent creator yes show.
This is terrible advice for institutions. Most people don’t have the mandate, interest, budget, or ability to produce 100 episodes, nor the hope. Some well-known organizations can launch a weekly talk show and attract listeners for a period of time based solely on their branding. But keeping them is another matter. For other institutions and centers still building reputations and networks, asking audiences to commit to an endless series is a tall order. Interest in podcasts remains strong; people have more and more sophisticated choices than ever before.
When podcasting becomes simple, the format becomes universal.
Part of the reason we got here is because podcasting has become so easy, in both the best and worst ways. Tools have improved, the price of decent audio gear has plummeted, and platforms have made publishing virtually frictionless. Lowered barriers to entry are great for access and experimentation. It also means “we should have a podcast” is now a default instinct rather than a strategic decision.
The result is a plethora of weekly interview shows that all feel roughly the same: host, guest, 45 minutes of conversation, and titles that read like panel descriptions. When these shows fail, they usually fail in one of two ways. They sound like a lecture (overstructured, dense, information-first) or a meeting (underedited, meandering, inside baseball). Both demonstrate the same problem: a poorly designed listener experience.
What is lost in the rush is not enthusiasm or expertise; form.
The weekly show encourages agencies to think about the gap to be filled rather than the journey to be designed. The question becomes “Who do we get on the podcast next?” rather than “What story are we telling and who really needs to hear it?”
There’s a formula that better suits the way institutions operate and the way people listen: limited series.
From endless feed to bingeable arc
The Limited Series doesn’t treat audio as a constant stream of audio, but as a complete experience. Instead of promising your listeners “new episodes every Tuesday,” you promise them:
“Five episodes will change the way you think about X.”
This simple transformation does three important things.
First, it matches the way people actually listen. A recent podcast trends report found that about 60% of listeners said miniseries or seasonal podcasts were easier to complete than ongoing shows. SiriusXM noted that among binge listeners, about 60% said they listened to the entire series within the first week of release, and nearly 9 in 10 said they were excited to listen to episodes from months ago. In other words, a well-crafted limited series can grab people’s attention quickly and keep them working long after release.
Second, it aligns with how the organization actually operates. Universities and mission-driven organizations are already thinking about projects and initiatives: the launch of new centers, major reports, grants, events, anniversaries. A three- to ten-episode storyline clearly maps this reality. It becomes a narrative companion to the work and a way to guide a specific audience to understand the why, the how, and the stakes.
Third, it forces craftsmanship. You can’t hang around when you only have a few episodes. You have to choose a central question, decide whose voices matter most, and design an arc so that each episode has a clear job to do. You’re not filling airtime; You’re building a story that people can binge and remember.
We’re already seeing this in higher education. The Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University recently launched Mosaic: 40 Years of Haas Centeris a three-part limited series about the past, present, and future of public service at Stanford University, all organized around the question of why service-learning is an important part of student life and how its impact extends beyond the university.
This is not an either/or choice. Limited series can exist within existing weekly programming as clearly branded “special seasons,” giving loyal listeners something to get hooked on while also creating a front door for new viewers who want a limited, bingeable story before deciding whether to subscribe. They can also be packaged and repurposed long after their initial release, as a project that you can point to in syllabi, events, grant reports, and fundraising campaigns.
this artificial intelligence, improvisation A podcast from the University of Maryland shows what this nested limited series could look like. This seven-part arc is designed to guide teachers from being curious about AI to being confident about living with it on a broader scale move needle Teaching Podcast. It begins with the episode “Host Handover” move needle Hosts Scott Riley and artificial intelligence, improvisation Co-hosts Mary Crawley-Farrell, Michael Mills and Jennifer Porter then take turns hosting programs on AI in business, journalism, nursing, psychology, English and graduate education. The episodes are all published in the same move needle And clearly marked as a “Special Edition,” making the series easy to find while still attracting traffic from the main show.
For institutional podcasts, this is a huge opportunity in this crowded, one-percenters landscape. You don’t need to win the “most episodes” of the game. You need to make a handful of episodes so compelling, so clear-cut in scope, so compelling that the right people choose to press play and keep playing.
Danielle LeCoultre Yes Founder and Principal Delecoura strategic communications studio that helps universities, research institutions, and mission-driven organizations transform complex ideas into stories that people care about. As a long-time strategist and podcaster, she has worked with institutions such as Harvard University, Southern Methodist University, University of Delaware, and Genentech to increase the visibility and impact of their work through storytelling and voice.
