The honest answer is no. But the real question is not about timing. It is about whether most shows are worth starting in the first place.
"The market is saturated." This is the most common reason senior teams give for hesitating. And it contains a grain of truth, presented in a way that obscures a more useful reality.
The numbers that look alarming
There are approximately 4.69 million podcasts indexed across major platforms as of mid-2026. That is a large number. Set against 619 million projected global listeners by year end, it still looks competitive.
But those figures need context. Of the 4.69 million indexed shows, only around 450,000 to 500,000 published a new episode in the last three months.
The majority of podcasts are abandoned, what the industry calls "podfade." Most shows that started never made it past the tenth episode.
The Podglomerate's CEO Jeff Umbro, who has worked across thousands of podcast campaigns, puts it plainly: "There's still space for new, meaningful shows, especially in underserved or niche areas." The total number of shows is less important than whether your specific audience is already well-served.
The audience is still growing
Meanwhile, the listening audience continues to expand. Podcast listeners worldwide grew from 506.9 million in 2023 to an estimated 584.1 million in 2025, a 28.57% increase over five years, according to eMarketer data compiled by DemandSage. Western European podcast listening penetration sits at around 31.9% of internet users, with steady growth projected through 2026.
In other words: more people are listening. Fewer shows are actively publishing. The noise is overstated, and the audience opportunity is underappreciated.
Video changed the format entirely
The more significant shift is not about whether to start a podcast. It is about what kind to start.
YouTube is now the most popular platform for podcast listening, used by 33% of weekly podcast consumers ahead of Spotify and Apple Podcasts. That shift happened because of video.
Shows that publish video alongside audio consistently outperform those that do not. Video podcast formats are 50 to 70% more engaging than audio-only equivalents, measured by comments, shares, and completion rates.
Mike Nicholson of Six Sells, whose podcast grew its audience by 723% after moving to proper video production, describes the shift simply: video is the format the main platforms are actively rewarding now. Portrait clips for LinkedIn and Instagram, full episodes on YouTube, audio distribution for Spotify and Apple: a single recording session can feed multiple channels, provided the production is handled properly from the start.
The shows that started audio-only in 2020 and have not made the transition to video are struggling for reach. New shows starting video-first today are operating at the format that earns attention.
What "too late" would actually look like
There is a version of this concern that has merit. If you want to build a mass audience around a general business topic, the window for easy growth has passed.
The biggest shows in those categories have established audiences, large distribution networks, and years of back catalogues. You will not dislodge them.
But the businesses asking this question rarely want to compete with Joe Rogan. They want to build credibility with a specific professional audience: their clients, their sector peers, the firms they want to work with.
That kind of focused show does not need a mass audience to be valuable. A show with 500 downloads per episode from senior decision-makers in UK financial services is worth considerably more to a professional services firm than 50,000 downloads from a general business audience.
The businesses best positioned are those with a subject they can genuinely own. As Resonate Recordings observes from over 50,000 episodes of client work, "the case is strong when the brand has a subject it can credibly own and the patience for a real channel."
The constraint is not the market. It is internal: the commitment to two years of consistent output, and the production quality to stand out when the audience does land.
What actually kills business podcasts
The data on this is consistent. Most business podcasts do not fail because the market is saturated. They fail because the operational burden of producing a show becomes unsustainable.
Scheduling, recording, editing, publishing, repurposing: these tasks compound quickly, especially for teams already managing a full commercial workload. Mike Nicholson identifies this as the primary cause of early abandonment: "When production becomes a hassle, and resources are stretched, consistency slips, and when consistency slips, momentum disappears."
The teams that make it to fifty episodes are almost never the ones who started with the best idea. They are the ones who solved the production problem early.
The other common failure mode is a misread on returns. Resonate Recordings notes that most business podcasts start showing real returns between months twelve and eighteen.
Teams that cancel at month ten have a hard time arguing the channel did not work. The investment required is a real two-year horizon, not a series of quarterly budget reviews.
The bottom line
Starting a business podcast in 2026 is not too late. But the bar is higher than it was in 2020, and the format has shifted decisively toward video.
A show that records once, publishes audio only, and posts irregularly will struggle regardless of when it launched. A show with clear positioning, consistent video-first production, and a realistic commitment to two years of output can still build something genuinely useful, and find an audience that has not been claimed.
The timing is fine. The question is whether the commitment is.
Starting now is mostly a production question: can you publish consistently from episode one. A podcast production agency removes the part that usually stops shows before episode twenty.
If you are weighing whether a podcast is worth committing to, and what it would take to do it properly, we are happy to talk through what that looks like in practice.