The Nigerian Podcast Index, published in February, breaks 329 shows down by genre. Society and culture leads with 113. Religion and spirituality, combined with Christianity, is second with 94. Education has 33, business 32 and news 21. Religion is therefore bigger than education, business and news added together, a finding almost nobody has repeated, including us.
When Nigeria's podcast census landed in February, the numbers that travelled were the ones that suited the story the industry likes telling about itself: 329 shows, 241 of them active, three in five hosted on a single free platform. We quoted those figures ourselves, twice. The genre table in the published index sat underneath, largely unread.
It deserves a second look, because it describes a different country from the one the coverage implies. Society and culture leads with 113 shows, which surprises nobody. The second entry is religion and spirituality, combined with Christianity, at 94. Education follows at 33, business at 32 and news at 21.
Put the bottom three together and they total 86. Religion alone beats them. For every Nigerian news podcast in the index there are more than four faith shows. If you had built your mental model of Nigerian podcasting from trade coverage, including ours, you would not have guessed that, because the shows that get written about are the interview formats, the comedy panels and the business shows that resemble what the industry already recognises as a podcast.
For every Nigerian news podcast in the census there are more than four faith shows. The gap between that and the coverage is not an accident. It is a definition.
The honest disclosure is that our own directory is built to under-count exactly this. Airtime's inclusion standard excludes sermon-only feeds, along with radio rebroadcasts and pure government communications, on the grounds that a recorded service published to an audio feed is a broadcast of an existing event rather than a podcast commissioned as one. That is a defensible editorial line and we are keeping it. It is also, unavoidably, a thumb on the scale. Our 493 listed shows are a directory of what we think podcasting is, and a large, organised, well-attended slice of Nigerian audio does not clear that bar.
Worth being precise about what the census does and does not say. It counts titles, not listening. Ninety four shows is a supply figure, and a genre can be crowded with small feeds while another genre with a fifth of the titles carries most of the actual audience. Nothing in the index tells you download numbers, and nobody should read this as proof that faith podcasts dominate Nigerian ears. The index also combines religion and spirituality with Christianity as one line, which flattens distinctions that matter, and it is a metadata snapshot from one analyst rather than an audited count.
What it does establish is that the infrastructure of Nigerian podcasting is being used at scale by institutions that were never the target market for any of it. Churches did not wait for a business model, a fund or an agency. They had a weekly audience, a recording setup and a reason to publish, which is more than most shows in the census can claim, and they are three in ten of everything indexed.
There is a commercial reading here that the industry's own coverage keeps stepping over. The genres attracting brand money in Nigeria are business, technology and lifestyle, and they sit near the bottom of the supply table. The largest reliable, recurring, loyal audiences in the country are being assembled weekly by organisations that measure attendance rather than downloads and have no interest in a rate card. Whether any of that is monetisable in a way sponsors recognise is a genuinely open question. It is a bigger one than most of the questions the sector is currently asking itself.
The census gave Nigeria a number. Its genre table gives the number a shape, and the shape is not the one the industry has been drawing. We will keep excluding sermon feeds from the directory. We should stop describing the market as though they were not there.