February 27, 2025

YouTube had “1 billion podcast listeners” in Jan

7 minutes

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YouTube released a new headline data point, suggesting that there were more than 1 billion viewers of podcast content a month in January. It also repeated that 400 million monthly hours of podcast watching were consumed on TV sets.

Putting the 1 billion number in context, Spotify claimed just 120mn monthly podcast listeners in November. Apple Podcasts is likely to be smaller in terms of monthly listeners, according to Podtrac in Jan 2023: but Apple Podcasts had a significantly higher share of downloads.

Worth remembering, too, that a listener to a second of “podcast” content on YouTube - even automatically-played content - will count towards the 1 billion figure, irrespective of the amount of downloads they make, or the time they spend with podcasts. Reach doesn’t translate to time spent. However, Edison Research said in Oct 2024 that, of all the podcast platforms, YouTube was used “most often” to listen to podcasts.

We wondered what YouTube considered a “podcast” to be. A YouTube spokesperson told us that the company follows the lead of creators marking a playlist as a “podcast” when they upload. The YouTube Podcasts homepage in the US, as one example, includes full TV news shows like NBC Nightly News and PBS NewsHour, which both broadcasters have marked as a “podcast” - but there are audio podcasts for NBC Nightly News and PBS News Hour as well. Australia’s podcasts homepage includes individual news stories from 7NEWS, which are in a YouTube playlist called 7NEWS Just In, but there’s also a 7NEWS Just In audio podcast, too.

YouTube’s blog post was authored by Tim Katz. Who’s he? He describes himself as “VP, Partnerships, Podcasts”. That’s the first outing for this job title; on LinkedIn, he’s “Director, Head of Sports + News Partnerships”; in news coverage in 2023, he was “Director and Global Head of Responsibility”; and in 2024, he was “Global Director of Responsibility and Leader for the Canada and Latin America region”. We don’t see any use of this podcasting job title until this announcement.

Katz is interviewed (as “Vice President for Partnerships”) in Bloomberg. The YouTube podcast trend “existed but it was a matter of us pouring some gas on it,” he said.

Some parts of the industry give notes of caution.

Transistor’s Justin Jackson believes, in a personal blog post, that the podcast industry is fundamentally misdiagnosing YouTube's role in consumers' lives and overestimating the benefits it will get from the platform.

Wondery’s founder Hernan Lopez suggests to keep in mind the bigger picture. “Of note, [YouTube] cited 400 million monthly hours of podcast watching on TV sets —but that's against 30 billion hours+ of [overall] YouTube time spent on TV sets.” He adds that the oft-quoted “$2bn” annual figure severely underestimates the total size of the podcast market (as it doesn’t count international, subscription, or video).

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