Everyone is famous for 15 people.

The Podcast as a New Podium – New York Times:

Will new listeners hurt podcasts? Part of the pleasure of tuning in – when, for hard-core devotees, the heyday of the scrappy form is already long past – is still the ambience of intimacy. With the podcasts by eccentrics and weird couples, in particular, listening feels like near-actionable eavesdropping… Steven Williams, a writer and Internet developer from the San Francisco Bay Area who has recently started a podcast about computing, is not in podcasting for the numbers. He sums up the amusement, clubbiness and probable evanescence of most individual shows with a podcasting maxim: “Everyone is famous for 15 people.”

“Famous for 15 people” is a terrific characterization of the explosive expansion of podcasts. Just as there were millions of web pages that were never browsed and there are millions of blogs that are never read, so there will be millions of podcasts that are never heard.