A statistical analysis of two leading podcasts

 

I was inspired a few weeks ago by a story that Five Thirty-Eight did analyzing the fields that guests on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert came from, in its first 100 episodes, and how they compared to the other late night talk shows.

In short, Five Thirty-Eight found that Colbert had a significantly higher percentage of guests from the worlds of technology, science, politics, literature and culture – outside of the usually dominant categories of guests – actors and musicians, or movie, TV and music stars.

So I wondered what the numbers would show about the nature of guest bookings in a long-running podcast, and whether the numbers would show that a given podcast, or podcasts in general, have more varied kinds of guests than TV talk shows, news programs or other larger media.

Choosing Chris Hardwick’s “Nerdist” and Marc Maron’s “WTF” for this comparison naturally does mean the results will be skewed toward entertainers of some kind, but these seem like the forums closest to a late-night TV talk show for evaluating in the same way.

You can see the findings in the attached chart. The percentage figures given are the percentages of that kind of guest out of the total number of guests to date on those podcasts – for “Nerdist,” this is through episode 797 and for “WTF,” through episode 695. The sample sizes therefore are different, but a few obvious conclusions spring up once all the data has been collected in this way.

Maron has a far greater emphasis on comedians as guests than Hardwick, while Hardwick has a far greater emphasis on actors than Maron. This is a little tricky, because there is some overlap between actors and comedians. For this comparison, I lumped guests that could be called both into one field or another, depending on quick judgment calls about which was their primary emphasis, or which pursuit they were better known for. On “Nerdist,” this meant 23 shows included as comedians could possibly be classified elsewhere, and 41 shows featuring actors. The percentages of his overall total for these are 2.8% for comedians and 5.1% for actors. For Maron, it’s 36 actors (5.2% of his total) and 38 comedians (5.5% of his total).

So I don’t think these significantly change the picture you’re seeing in the graph, but let’s say you did arbitrarily switch them. You could only potentially increase Hardwick’s percentage of comedians by 2.3% and reduce Maron’s percentage of comedians by 0.3% -- and therefore vice versa for actors.

Anyway, onto other interesting conclusions about the guest rosters. Hardwick more frequently had no guests – with episodes he calls “Hostfuls” where he banters with co-hosts Matt Mira and Jonah Ray. Maron’s miscellaneous episodes, as placed on the graph under “no guests”, are actually mostly live panel episodes, with panels consisting mostly of comedians – if you moved these to the “comedians” category, it would increase his percentage of comedians even more.

Maron shows a deeper interest in music, but the percentage of his guests who are musicians isn’t that much more than Hardwick’s. And the percentages of guests for both shows who are anywhere outside their strongholds of entertainers, such as authors, writers, fellow broadcasters and podcasters, and even film directors – if you consider them a little more specific or specialized than actors and comedians, is relatively small – possibly even smaller than some of Colbert’s percentages of such guests on a network TV talk show.

Both podcasts had a negligible percentage of guests from areas not shown on the chart. Hardwick has only had 7 guests from the world of comic books – and I think that’s counting two different Stan Lee appearances. Visual artists, film and TV producers, entrepreneurs, business people and chefs number under 5 appearances on both shows.

So, what’s the point of all this? What the numbers really bear out here is that podcasting (or at least these two popular, well-known and successful podcasts) may not be so much more rarified in the professions of their guests than TV talk shows are. One could even make a case that “The Nerdist” is not really so nerdy since it has such a small percentage of guests from the comic book industry, video gaming, science or technology. Although to truly back that up, one might have to tally how many of Hardwick’s guests were from The Walking Dead, Star Trek or other nerd favorites, and analyze how much of the content from his “Hostful” shows covered that ground.