I spent some time digging into one of my favorite questions over the weekend – how do people perceive their media habits to be changing? While self-reported estimates of how much time people spend with every type of media they consume are subject to the vagaries of memory, people generally have a great sense of what they have been spending more or less time with than they used to – it’s as much a measure of top-of-mind importance as it is hours and minutes.

This is a question we asked in our annual survey of the media universe, The Podcast Landscape, which, at 5,071 Americans 18+, is the largest publicly available study of podcasting and the other media with which it intersects. We threw about 15 different media types at our nationally representative sample of humans and asked them which ones they had spent more time with or less time with compared to a year ago.

The top five should surprise no one, at least no one who’s been reading this newsletter:

Media listened to “More” in the last 12 months (Top Five)

TikTok – 53%

YouTube – 49%

Podcasts – 45%

Instagram – 42%

Paid Streaming Music – 41%

The good news, of course, is that podcasting is in the top three, and it has a very healthy score. The top two should also not surprise you because online video has devoured the world, our little corner included. And I am not going to call the 45% figure for podcasting a “mixed bag” (it’s a really good showing, considering the sample is the general population and not just podcast consumers); however, there is no doubt that number two on the list had a lot to do with number three.

That’s the “nice list,” according to Media Claus. Here’s the other one:

Media listened to “Less” in the last 12 months (Top Five)

X/Twitter – 27%

AM/FM Broadcast Radio – 26%

AM/FM Streaming Radio – 26%

Facebook – 24%

Instagram – 22%

Again, the top three is not a huge surprise. There has been such a public outcry about X/Twitter, and this year it was clear that a lot of the performative departures of a couple of years ago turned into real ones, as X transformed from town hall meeting to beer hall putsch. Similarly, the long, slow decline of commercial broadcast radio (and I am not talking about public or non-commercial radio) has been obvious in every study I’ve seen in the last decade. You cannot listen to an hour of streaming commercial broadcast radio and an hour of streaming ad-supported music or podcasting and think these things co-exist in the same universe, at least in terms of spotload.

For some media companies, the story has simply been one of transition, orderly or not. The media was full of stories a week ago about the ratings declines at MSNBC for some of their top shows, like The Rachel Maddow Show, but those articles usually fail to mention that Maddow reliably falls in the Top 50 podcasts by any measure. Her audience is simply less and less the “stay up and watch it live at 9 PM” type and more the “listen to it Tuesday morning in the car” type. 

Here is what concerns me about all of these numbers: the naughty and the nice. Let’s pull back from discussions of radio vs. podcasting vs. YouTube and recognize that there are really only three types of media we consume: audio, video, and text. Everything else is presentation or delivery. Keep that in mind as you look at the “nice” and “naughty” lists again, this time by Adults 18-34:

Media listened to “More” in the last 12 months (Top Three – Adults 18-34)

TikTok – 57%

YouTube – 54%

Instagram – 50%

Media listened to “Less” in the last 12 months (Top Three – Adults 18-34)

AM/FM Broadcast Radio – 37%

AM/FM Streaming Radio – 37%

Network/Cable TV – 33%

Looking at the young end of the sample provides an exaggerated look at the trends we see overall. Network/cable TV enters the top three on the naughty list, which is one of the drivers behind the MSNBC stories, and the impact of online video is clearly even higher. Setting aside the specific, though, and just looking at the Three True Types of media, younger demos are trading audio for video, period. 

It’s been hard to get my 20-year-old son into podcasting. Believe me, I have tried every carrot and stick to coerce and cajole him into listening to podcasts. He just doesn’t. And as I look back on my various attempts to impress upon him how I make my living, I realize I’ve done it all wrong. I’ve tried to lure him with individual podcasts. If he already had the spoken word audio habit, this might have been successful. But he went right from Spotify (music) to YouTube and skipped some of the steps that many of us grew up listening to. He didn’t grow up listening to jocks talk around the music, or wacky morning shows, or much else in terms of spoken word audio. He’s only ever had an iPhone, and it gives him everything he’s ever wanted.

Instead, I think I should have sold him on spoken word audio, period. I should have talked about how he could listen to interesting shows about music theory or great performers or even his heritage while driving, working out, or resting his eyes before bed. I should have talked more about the power of audio and storytelling to spark the imagination and how important it is to turn off the screens every now and then and let your brain do a little work.

And ultimately, I think about all of this because I wonder if spoken word audio, the backbone of podcasting, is something that you grow into as your life evolves, or does someone need to impress it upon you when you are young, like smoking or meth? When today’s teenager buys their first self-driving car with a screen, and every podcast they are interested in is on YouTube, what brings them to audio? 

We need to do some things as an industry to protect and promote spoken word audio because that is what makes podcasting special in multiple senses, including premium CPMs and superior advertising effectiveness and conversion. We need better audio podcast clients that make it just as easy to find and visualize podcast content as the video clients do and provide the same sense of community and being seen that YouTube comments provide. And we also need to talk about the power of audio more: what makes it different from video, when and how you would consume it, and why you would want to. Not to “defeat” video – video isn’t going anywhere. But to present a positive alternative option for alternative contexts and remind people that audio is special and different.

It’s selling audio that is really crucial for us in 2025, and I think podcasters of all stripes need to talk about it, even if your show is a video show. We can build better audio podcast clients, but asking people to migrate to audio AND change podcast clients is too many behaviors to change at once. We can sell audio better first, and I think we have to because podcasting is never going to “own” video. Apropos of my “Walled Gardens and Rented Land” article from a couple of weeks ago, we need to build on as much rented land as we can – that’s where the people are. But we also need to own something special, and I continue to believe in the power of spoken word audio as exactly that special something.

Happy holidays – we’ll be back next year (starting January 6th) with brand new reports on business podcasts, the news audience, branded podcasting, and a whole lot more! We are starting the first quarter of next year with a bang, and we are so grateful to you and our family of partners for making it all possible.