113 Podcast Statistics October 2026

Podcast statistics for 2026 show a medium that is no longer only audio. In Q3 2025, for the first time in Edison's tracking, video briefly overtook audio: more US weekly podcast consumers watched video podcasts (82%) than listened to audio-only shows (78%), against 89% audio-only and 73% video in 2023 (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026). Viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on YouTube on living-room devices in October 2025, up from 400 million hours a year earlier (YouTube, Dec 2025).

Only 17% of US adults who know the term now expect a podcast to be audio-only, down from 21% in 2025 (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026). Every episode is still speech, and speech without text is hard to search or follow for anyone who cannot hear it well.

This page covers how many people listen, who they are, how many podcasts exist, how video changed the format, what podcast advertising is worth and how transcripts help shows get found. Every number links to the organisation that produced it: survey firms, platform newsrooms, SEC filings, the open Podcast Index, and WHO and NIH for hearing data. For the wider shift to speaking instead of typing, see our voice search statistics, and for recorded work calls, our meeting statistics.

How many people listen to podcasts?

Podcasting is a mass medium, and US reach set a new record in 2026. Outside the US, the picture depends heavily on whether a survey counts all podcasts or only news shows.

How many Americans listen to or watch podcasts?

45% of Americans 12 and older, an estimated 130 million people, listened to or watched a podcast in the last week, up from 40% in 2025 and 7% in 2013 (Edison Research at SSRS, Mar 2026).

Edison and Pew measure different things. Edison surveys everyone 12 and older and, since 2025, counts watching as well as listening. Pew asks adults 18 and older about the past 12 months. Read each number with its population.

• 80% of Americans aged 12 and older have ever listened to or watched a podcast, an estimated 230 million people and up from 73% in 2025, and 86% (an estimated 248 million) are aware of podcasting (Edison Research at SSRS, Mar 2026).
• 54% of US adults listened to a podcast in the past 12 months in 2025, up from 49% when Pew first asked in 2022 (Pew Research Center, Sep 2025).
• One in five US podcast listeners said they listen nearly every day in a December 2022 survey of 5,132 adults (Pew Research Center, Apr 2023).

Is podcast listening growing or declining?

Growing. Monthly podcast reach among Americans 12 and older was 9% in 2008, passed 40% in 2021 and reached 55% in 2025, the first year Edison counted watching as well as listening (Edison Research at SSRS, Mar 2026).

Part of the 2025 jump comes from that change in the question, so the 2024 to 2026 rise is not like-for-like. Time spent tells the same story without the definitional caveat: hours and share of spoken-word listening both rose. The shift is sharpest among young adults.

• In 2015, AM/FM radio took 75% of the time Americans 13 and older spent with spoken-word audio and podcasts took 10% (Edison Research at SSRS, Feb 2026).
• Among Americans aged 18 to 29, podcasts and AM/FM radio each took 14% of daily audio listening time in 2025, a tie; in 2014 AM/FM led podcasts in this age group by more than 7 to 1 (Edison Research at SSRS, Aug 2025).
• 32% of US adults got news from podcasts at least sometimes in 2025, including 10% who do so often, up from 22% in 2020 (Pew Research Center, Sep 2025).

How many people listen to podcasts outside the US?

About a quarter in the UK. There, 26% of adults aged 15 and older listen to podcast episodes in an average week, for about 6.9 hours each, a total of 106 million listening hours a week (RAJAR, Aug 2026).

The Reuters Institute figures below count only news podcasts used as a news source by online news users, so they run well below total podcast reach.

• A year earlier, 24% of UK adults listened in an average week for about 9.0 hours each, 124 million hours in total, so UK reach rose while total hours fell (RAJAR, Sep 2025).
• 29% of Germans aged 14 and older, about 20 million people, listen to podcasts at least once a month, stable on 2025 (Online-Audio-Monitor, Sep 2026).
• Among Germans under 30, regular podcast use rose again to 48% in 2026 (Online-Audio-Monitor, Sep 2026).
• 11% of online news users across the 48 markets surveyed used news podcasts as a news source in the last week in 2026, unchanged on 2025 and flat in most markets (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• Weekly news podcast use ranged from 17% of online news users in Indonesia, the highest of any market, to 3% in Japan, the lowest (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).

Who is the podcast audience?

The podcast audience is younger, more educated and more diverse than the population, but the age gap is closing because older adults keep joining while the under-30 rate has stopped rising. Where people listen has moved too: home beats the car, and the TV is the one screen gaining ground.

Which age groups and demographics listen to podcasts most?

Adults under 50 listen most, but older groups are gaining fastest. Between 2022 and 2025, past-year podcast listening rose from 42% to 50% among Americans aged 50 to 64 and from 58% to 62% among 30 to 49 year olds, while the youngest group held flat (Pew Research Center, Sep 2025).

Edison's figures for the oldest group partly reflect its 2025 switch to counting watching, so the size of the 55+ jump is part behaviour, part definition.

• 44% of Americans aged 55 and older listened to or watched a podcast in the past month in 2026, up from 21% in 2023, and 35 to 54 year olds (68%) now edge out 12 to 34 year olds (64%) (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).
• 63% of Black Americans and 60% of Latino Americans aged 12 and older are monthly podcast consumers (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).
• Americans aged 25 to 34 make up 23% of monthly podcast consumers against 18% of all adults, while those 65 and older are 12% of consumers against 20% of adults (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• 39% of US monthly podcast consumers hold a bachelor's degree or higher and 38% have children under 18 at home, against 34% and 31% of all adults (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• In the UK, 71% of podcast listeners are under 55, and the audience splits 54% male and 46% female (RAJAR, Aug 2026).

Where, how and on which apps do podcast listeners tune in?

Mostly at home, and mostly on YouTube. 66% of US weekly podcast consumers listen most often at home, against 13% in a vehicle and 7% at work, in Q1 2026; the at-home share was 61% in 2024 (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

Platform shares depend on the question. "Used most often" and "used in the past year" produce different rankings, so each figure below carries its own measure.

• YouTube is the service US weekly podcast consumers use most often for podcasts (37%), ahead of Spotify (21%) and Apple Podcasts (12%) in Q1 2026; in 2024 the split was 31%, 28% and 14% (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).
• Podcast-native apps are losing their hold: 15% of US podcast consumers call one their most-used platform, down from 19% in 2025, and Apple Podcasts fell from 11% to 8% (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• The smart TV is the only device gaining share as the main way Americans consume podcasts, rising from 8% in 2024 to 12% in 2026, while the smartphone still leads at 57% (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• Americans who consume podcasts daily spend 5 hours 11 minutes a day with audio, against 3 hours 57 minutes for everyone 13 and older, and podcasts take 36% of their audio time (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).
• In the UK, 58% of podcast listening hours happen at home, 13% in a car, van or lorry, 13% at work or a place of study and 12% on public transport or walking, and 87% of podcast hours are consumed alone (RAJAR, Aug 2026).

What do podcast listeners listen to, and do they trust it?

Comedy, entertainment and true crime lead, and most listeners come to learn something. Nearly half of US podcast listeners regularly listen to podcasts about comedy (47%) or entertainment, pop culture and the arts (46%), and about four in ten to politics and government (41%), science and technology (40%) or history (40%), according to Pew's December 2022 survey (Pew Research Center, Apr 2023).

Trust in news heard on podcasts is high, and it splits along party lines.

• 88% of US podcast listeners say learning is a reason they listen and 87% say entertainment, while 81% use podcasts as something to have on in the background (Pew Research Center, Apr 2023).
• 79% of US podcast consumers rate hearing discussions on topics that interest them as an important reason to consume podcasts, ahead of having something for the car or travel (64%) and getting news or political analysis (56%) (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• In a December 2022 Pew survey, 87% of US podcast listeners who hear news on podcasts expected that news to be mostly accurate (Pew Research Center, Apr 2023).
• Among Americans who get news from podcasts, 23% trust it more than news from other sources, 23% trust it less and 53% about the same; 31% of Republicans and Republican leaners trust podcast news more, about twice the share of Democrats and Democratic leaners (15%) (Pew Research Center, Sep 2025).
• 83% of UK podcast listeners say they listen to or watch all or most of each episode they download, and 64% get through one to three episodes in an average week (RAJAR, Aug 2026).

How many podcasts are there?

There are millions of podcasts and most of them are finished. The headline catalogue counts are real, but the number that tells you how big podcasting is today is how many shows published something this month.

How many podcasts and episodes exist?

About 4.7 million. The Podcast Index, the open directory of RSS podcast feeds, lists 4,733,182 podcasts (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).

Directories count differently. Listen Notes strips out deleted, empty and AI-generated feeds, and Spotify counts titles on its own service, so the three totals should not be averaged.

• Those feeds hold 167,802,356 episodes between them (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).
• Listen Notes, a podcast search engine that runs its own index, counts at least 3,817,321 podcasts and 194,930,605 episodes after removing feeds that were deleted, hold only a test clip, carry no audio or are AI-generated (Listen Notes, Sep 2026).
• Spotify says listeners can find 7 million podcast titles on its service, next to more than 100 million music tracks (Spotify, Aug 2026).
• English-language shows make up 2,319,655 of the podcasts in Listen Notes' index, about 61%, followed by Spanish (396,255) and Portuguese (221,901) (Listen Notes, Sep 2026).

How many podcasts are still publishing new episodes?

Fewer than one in ten. Only 466,354 podcasts in the index published an episode in the last 90 days, 339,544 in the last 30 days and 105,992 in the last 3 days, an active share of about 9.9% over 90 days and 7.2% over 30 days by our calculation (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).

The shows that are active publish a lot, and the platforms have lowered the bar for small shows to earn money.

• Active shows released 2,389,900 new episodes in the last 30 days and 6,273,334 in the last 90 days (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).
• Listen Notes counts 558,571 podcasts whose latest episode came out in 2026, about 15% of its index (Listen Notes, Sep 2026).
• Spotify cut the bar to join the Spotify Partner Program from 12 published episodes, 2,000 listeners and 10,000 hours consumed to 3 episodes, 1,000 engaged audience members and 2,000 hours over 30 days (Spotify, Jan 2026).
• The shows that reach the top keep a steady schedule: in Pew's study of 451 top-ranked podcasts in 2022, 61% released episodes at least once a week (Pew Research Center, Jun 2023).

What kinds of shows rise to the top, and how long are they?

Long interview and true crime shows. The Joe Rogan Experience, Crime Junkie and The Daily were the three most-reached podcasts in the US in Q2 2026, based on interviews with 5,006 weekly podcast consumers aged 13 and older (Edison Research at SSRS, Jul 2026).

Rankings by platform agree at the top. Episode length is where US and UK charts differ.

• The Joe Rogan Experience was the most popular show on Apple Podcasts in the US in 2025, and Good Hang with Amy Poehler was the top new show (Apple, Nov 2025).
• On Spotify, 2.7 million people have listened to 20 or more episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience in a single calendar month, making it the platform's most binge-listened podcast (Spotify, Apr 2026).
• True crime was the most common topic among the 451 top-ranked US podcasts Pew studied in 2022, at 24%, ahead of politics and government (10%) and entertainment, pop culture and the arts (9%) (Pew Research Center, Jun 2023).
• Most top-ranked podcasts ran between 20 and 50 minutes per episode in 2022 (54%); 6% averaged under 20 minutes and 18% averaged more than 70 (Pew Research Center, Jun 2023).
• The top 25 podcasts in the UK average 54 minutes per episode, against 64 minutes for the top 25 in the US, in an analysis Edison ran with the hosting company Ausha (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

Are video podcasts replacing audio?

No. Video added a second way to consume the same shows, most people who watch also listen, and the platforms that pay creators now reward video.

How many people watch podcasts on YouTube?

Most podcast consumers have used it. 64% of US weekly podcast consumers have used YouTube to consume podcasts, against 42% who have used Spotify (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

YouTube's lead holds on the TV screen and has now reached the UK, where Spotify used to be the default.

• 63% of US adults who have ever consumed a podcast used YouTube for podcasts in the past 12 months, and 68% used at least one YouTube property once YouTube Music is counted (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• Among US podcast consumers who use more than one app for podcasts on a smart TV, 71% use YouTube most, down from 76% in 2025 (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• In the UK, 29% of weekly podcast listeners aged 15 and older use YouTube most for podcasts, passing Spotify (28%) for the first time on record (Edison Research at SSRS, Jul 2026).

How fast is video podcasting growing on Spotify, Netflix and TV?

Fast, and the money follows it. Video shows in the Spotify Partner Program have grown their consumption hours by more than 45% on average since the program launched (Spotify, Sep 2026).

Netflix only started carrying podcasts in 2026 and is already a top-three platform in one US survey. In open RSS feeds, video is still rare.

• Spotify carried more than 250,000 video podcast shows in mid-2024, up from 100,000 in 2023, and more than 170 million users had watched a video podcast on it by then (Spotify, Jun 2024).
• Video podcast consumption on Spotify rose more than 20% in the first weeks after the Spotify Partner Program, which pays creators for video, launched in January 2025 (Spotify, Feb 2025).
• 21% of US adults who have ever consumed a podcast used Netflix for podcasts in the past 12 months, making it the third most-named podcast platform behind YouTube and Spotify in its first year in the category (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• Netflix told shareholders that about half of its viewing happens in the evening, while its new video podcasts over-index on daytime and mobile viewing, which it reads as added engagement (Netflix, Jul 2026).
• Only 14,616 feeds in the open Podcast Index declare themselves video podcasts with the Podcasting 2.0 medium tag, about 0.3% of the index by our calculation, so most video podcasting happens on platforms rather than in RSS (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).

Do audiences prefer to watch or listen?

Neither wins. By Q1 2026, audio-only use had recovered to 80% of US weekly podcast consumers while actively watched video slipped to 78%, so the two formats now reach almost the same share (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

Most people do both, and weekly time among video watchers fell this year even as more people watched.

• 57% of Americans aged 12 and older have both listened to and watched a podcast, 21% have only listened and 2% have only watched (Edison Research at SSRS, Mar 2026).
• 44% of US adults who have ever consumed a podcast watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40% a year earlier (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• 77% of US weekly podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 72%, yet that group's average weekly podcast time fell from 6.9 to 5.9 hours while audio-only consumers held steady at 4.8 hours (Sounds Profitable, Sep 2026).
• In an unweighted survey of 5,061 US adults who use ad-supported media platforms, 37% of those who consume both formats prefer watching, 29% prefer listening and 34% have no preference (Sounds Profitable, Jul 2026).
• Among clip viewers in the same survey, 81% say clips lead them to watch a specific episode at least sometimes, but only 30% say it happens often or always (Sounds Profitable, Jul 2026).

How big is podcast advertising, and how do creators get paid?

Podcast advertising is a small slice of US digital ad money, and it keeps growing faster than the digital market around it and far faster than the rest of digital audio. The dollars pile up at the big networks, so most independent shows still rely on listeners and platform payouts.

How much is US podcast advertising worth?

Billions, and growing faster than digital advertising overall. Total US digital ad revenue grew 13.9% to USD 294.6 billion in 2025, so podcast ad revenue outgrew the digital market as a whole by nearly 4 percentage points (IAB and PwC, Apr 2026).

The IAB and PwC series counts revenue reported by ad sellers. Company filings show how much of it the largest networks take.

• Podcast ad revenue rose 26.4% to USD 2,433.1 million in 2024, after growing only 5.5% in 2023 to USD 1,925.2 million (IAB and PwC, Apr 2025).
• Ad buyers expect podcast ad spend to grow 8.7% in 2026, below the 12.3% forecast for the total US ad market (IAB, Sep 2026).
• iHeartMedia, which calls itself the number one podcast publisher in downloads, listeners and revenue, booked USD 563.7 million in podcast revenue in 2025, up 25.6% from USD 448.8 million (iHeartMedia, Mar 2026).
• iHeartMedia's podcast revenue rose 20.7% to USD 162.1 million in Q2 2026, about 17% of the company's USD 977 million total revenue for the quarter (iHeartMedia, Aug 2026).
• SiriusXM's Pandora and Off-platform advertising revenue rose 5% to USD 413 million in Q2 2026, which the company attributed to strength in podcasting and higher programmatic demand and technology fees, partly offset by softer streaming music ads (SiriusXM, Jul 2026).

Do podcast ads work?

Younger listeners act on them most. After hearing a podcast sponsorship or ad, 66% of weekly podcast consumers aged 13 to 34 and 67% of those aged 35 to 54 visited the company's website, and 58% and 56% recommended the product, against 45% and 28% of listeners 55 and older (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

The weak point is measurement, not response. Marketers plan to spend more but are less sure they can prove the return.

• Podcasts take 16% of the time Americans 13 and older spend with ad-supported audio each day, and 51% among daily podcast listeners (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).
• In a pharmaceutical brand's media plan modelled with Nielsen Podcast Fusion data, moving 5% of a TV-only budget into podcasts raised reach among adults 18 to 54 from 39% to 55%, a 41% lift that added 26 million people without increasing spend (Edison Research at SSRS, Mar 2026).
• 28% of US podcast listeners said in a December 2022 survey that they had bought something promoted or discussed on a podcast (Pew Research Center, Apr 2023).
• 54% of marketers worldwide (66% in North America) planned to raise podcast ad spending, but only 49% were extremely or very confident they could measure its return (Nielsen, Sep 2023).

How do podcasters earn money beyond ads?

From listeners and from platform payouts. 21% of US weekly podcast consumers gave money to support a podcast in the past 12 months; of those, 47% did so to support a host or other individual and 36% to become a member for exclusive content (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

Platform payouts are company-reported figures. Spotify's numbers in particular mix creator payments with its own spending.

• Just 6% of US adults paid for or gave money to news podcasts in the past 12 months through subscriptions, donations or memberships, against 17% who paid any news source (Pew Research Center, Sep 2025).
• Spotify Partner Program payouts to podcast creators in January 2025 were 300% higher than a year earlier, and hundreds of creators passed USD 10,000 in monthly revenue on Spotify in the program's first month (Spotify, Feb 2025).
• Since Spotify loosened Partner Program eligibility in early 2026, total monthly payouts to enrolled shows have risen by more than a third, and the program is expanding to more than 35 new markets (Spotify, Sep 2026).
• Spotify estimates that its investments across its podcast business contributed more than USD 10 billion to the podcast industry over the past five years, a company estimate that bundles creator payouts with its own spending (Spotify, Jan 2026).

How do transcripts make podcasts easier to find and follow?

Hundreds of millions of people live with disabling hearing loss, and an episode without text is hard to search. The big platforms now generate transcripts automatically, so text is becoming a standard part of how episodes are searched and followed.

How many people may struggle to follow spoken audio?

Hundreds of millions worldwide, and the number is rising. Nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss by 2050, and more than 700 million of them, about 1 in 10 people, will have disabling hearing loss (WHO, Mar 2026).

These figures describe how common hearing loss is. Transcripts are not a treatment; they give people another way to get the same content.

• Over 1 billion young adults are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss because of unsafe listening practices (WHO, Mar 2026).
• Unaddressed hearing loss costs the world almost USD 1 trillion a year (WHO, Mar 2026).
• WHO's 2021 World Report on Hearing projects that by 2050 the largest numbers of people with hearing loss will be in the Western Pacific (about 760 million) and South-East Asia (about 660 million), while the count in the Eastern Mediterranean and African regions will more than double (WHO, Mar 2021).
• Hearing loss rises with age: over 25% of people older than 60 have disabling hearing loss (WHO, Mar 2026).
• In the US, NIDCD's analysis of 2015 to 2020 NHANES hearing exams finds disabling hearing loss in about 5% of adults aged 45 to 54, 10% at 55 to 64, 22% at 65 to 74 and 55% of those 75 and older (NIDCD, Sep 2024).

Which podcast platforms transcribe episodes automatically?

Apple Podcasts and Spotify both generate transcripts automatically, and YouTube has auto-captioned videos since 2009. Apple Podcasts now offers transcripts across more than 125 million episodes in 13 languages (Apple, Feb 2026).

Platform transcripts stay inside each app. A creator who wants text on their own site, in show notes or in the RSS feed still has to produce it, which is the job a transcription app does. Most listeners approve of AI-made transcripts.

• Apple added automatic transcripts to Apple Podcasts in March 2024 for English, French, Spanish and German shows in more than 170 countries and regions; listeners can search an episode for a word or phrase and tap the text to play from that point (Apple, Mar 2024).
• In September 2023 Spotify expanded auto-generated, time-synced transcripts to more shows, with a rollout to millions of episodes over the following weeks (Spotify, Sep 2023).
• By February 2017 more than 1 billion YouTube videos carried automatic captions, and people watched videos with automatic captions more than 15 million times a day (YouTube, Feb 2017).
• Transcript is the most widely supported Podcasting 2.0 tag: by our count, 82 of the 143 apps, hosts and directories listed in the Podcast Index app directory support it, ahead of search (75) and chapters (74) (Podcast Index, Oct 2026).
• 60% of US weekly podcast consumers aged 13 and older approve of podcasts using generative AI to generate transcripts (Edison Research at SSRS, Jun 2026).

How do listeners discover new podcasts and search inside them?

Mostly through other people and platform recommendations, with text-driven tools catching up. Word of mouth from friends and family is the most common way UK podcast listeners find shows (27%), ahead of social media (22%), suggestions from a podcast player or chart (18%), radio (18%) and YouTube (15%) (RAJAR, Aug 2026).

Search, chapters and typed prompts all depend on the words in an episode.

• More than 34 million podcasts are discovered for the first time every week on Spotify, by Spotify's own measure (Spotify, Apr 2026).
• More than half of the listeners who have used Spotify's Prompted Playlists for podcasts, which build an episode list from a typed request, have discovered a new show through it (Spotify, May 2026).
• By May 2026, Spotify listeners were saving podcast chapters and adding them to playlists more than 2 million times a month (Spotify, May 2026).
• Video often works as the discovery route for audio: 72% of people who started consuming podcasts in the past year, and 68% of those listening for five years or more, say they began listening to a show's audio-only version after finding its video version (Edison Research at SSRS, Jan 2026).

Glossary

• RSS: Really Simple Syndication, the open feed format podcasts publish on. Directories and apps read a show's RSS feed to find new episodes.
• Podcasting 2.0: an open extension to podcast RSS feeds that adds tags for transcripts, chapters, video (the medium tag) and other features.
• Podcast Index: an open, free directory of podcast RSS feeds that publishes its counts daily.
• Share of Ear: Edison Research's survey of how Americans 13 and older divide their daily audio listening time.
• Edison Podcast Metrics: Edison Research's ongoing survey of US weekly podcast consumers aged 13 and older, used for its top-show and network rankings.
• MIDAS: RAJAR's Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services survey of UK online audio and podcast listening.
• DNR: the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, an annual survey of online news users in 48 markets.
• IAB: Interactive Advertising Bureau, the US digital advertising trade body that publishes ad revenue figures with PwC.
• SEC 8-K: a filing US public companies make with the Securities and Exchange Commission, used here for earnings releases.
• Spotify Partner Program: Spotify's program that pays podcast creators based on audience engagement, mainly with video.
• Automatic captions: captions YouTube generates from a video's speech with speech recognition.
• Disabling hearing loss: WHO's term for hearing loss greater than 35 decibels in the better hearing ear.
• NIDCD: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the US National Institutes of Health.
• NHANES: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a US federal survey that includes hearing exams.

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page comes from the organisation that produced the data: survey firms such as Edison Research at SSRS, Pew Research Center, Sounds Profitable, RAJAR and the Online-Audio-Monitor, the Reuters Institute, platform newsrooms (Spotify, YouTube, Apple), SEC filings (iHeartMedia, SiriusXM, Netflix), the open Podcast Index and Listen Notes for their own indexes, and WHO and NIDCD for hearing data. We do not cite statistics roundups or blogs that repeat other people's numbers. Each link was opened on 2 October 2026 to confirm that it loads, that the number is on the page and that the date is right. Populations (12+, 13+, 18+, online news users) and windows (week, month, year) are kept as separate claims and never combined. Edison changed its question in 2025 from "listened to" to "listened to or watched", so its 2024 to 2026 comparisons are flagged. Podcast Index counts change daily and are dated to the month they were read. Platform figures are company-reported. The page is refreshed monthly.

Sources

• Apple: Apple introduces a new video podcast experience on Apple Podcasts
• Apple: Apple Podcasts unveils the most popular shows and trends of 2025
• Apple: Apple introduces transcripts for Apple Podcasts
• Edison Research at SSRS: The Infinite Dial 2026 (PDF)
• Edison Research at SSRS: The Podcast Consumer 2026 (PDF)
• Edison Research at SSRS: Total Podcast Consumption Time Up 386% Since 2016
• Edison Research at SSRS: Podcasts Lead AM/FM in Spoken-Word Listening, Marking a First
• Edison Research at SSRS: Podcast Listening Ties AM/FM Among 18-29 Year Olds
• Edison Research at SSRS: Crime Pays? (true crime surpasses comedy)
• Edison Research at SSRS: The Top 50 Podcasts in the U.S. Q2 2026
• Edison Research at SSRS: Average Episode Length of the Top 25 UK Podcasts
• Edison Research at SSRS: How Popular is Podcast Consumption on Netflix and Tubi?
• Edison Research at SSRS: YouTube Surpasses Spotify as UK's Preferred Podcast Platform
• Edison Research at SSRS: Reallocating Ad Dollars to Podcasts Can Deliver 41% Growth in Reach
• Edison Research at SSRS: How New Consumers are Shaping Podcasting's Next Chapter
• IAB: IAB Raises 2026 U.S. Ad Spend Forecast to +12.3% YoY Growth
• IAB and PwC: Digital Ad Revenue Climbs to Nearly $300B (Internet Advertising Revenue Report, full year 2025)
• IAB and PwC: Internet Advertising Revenue Report, Full Year 2024 (PDF)
• iHeartMedia: Q4 and full year 2025 earnings release (SEC 8-K)
• iHeartMedia: Q2 2026 earnings release (SEC 8-K)
• Listen Notes: Podcast stats
• Netflix: Q2 2026 shareholder letter (SEC 8-K, Exhibit 99.1)
• NIDCD: Quick Statistics About Hearing, Balance, and Dizziness
• Nielsen: As podcast advertising grows, brand lift data can help brands demystify the ROI of their spending
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• Pew Research Center: A Profile of the Top-Ranked Podcasts in the U.S.
• Pew Research Center: Formats used by top-ranked podcasts
• Podcast Index: Stats
• Podcast Index: Daily counts (JSON)
• Podcast Index: Apps
• RAJAR: MIDAS Summer 2026 (PDF)
• RAJAR: MIDAS Summer 2025 (PDF)
• Reuters Institute: Digital News Report 2026 (PDF)
• SiriusXM: Q2 2026 earnings release (SEC 8-K)
• Sounds Profitable: The Podcast Landscape 2026, Part One: Core Podcast Metrics (PDF)
• Sounds Profitable: The Podcast Atlas 2026 (PDF)
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• Spotify: 250,000 Video Podcasts and Counting
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• Spotify: Spotify Levels Up Our Podcast Experience With New Features for Fans and Creators
• Spotify: Spotify's Partner Program Helps Creators Increase Revenue and Consumption of Video Podcasts
• Spotify: The Spotify Partner Program Expands to More Than 35 New Markets
• Spotify: A Defining Moment for Podcasts, after contributing more than $10 billion to the industry
• Spotify: Everything In Store for Podcast Listeners and Creators This International Podcast Day
• Spotify: Prompted Playlist Levels Up to Include Podcasts
• Spotify: Podcast Clips Make Your Favorite Moments Easier to Save and Share
• WHO: Deafness and hearing loss (fact sheet)
• WHO: World Report on Hearing (PDF)
• YouTube: Celebrating 1 billion monthly podcast users on YouTube
• YouTube: How podcasts took over the living room in 2025
• YouTube: One billion captioned videos