Hey, it’s me, the guy who makes bar graphs again, with another bar graph about making more money and growing the audience. I’ve noted in this space before that we can’t expect the reach of podcasting to continue to go up year after year, and the population figures for regular podcast consumers do appear to have hit a flat patch. However, the more encouraging figure from The Podcast Landscape 2025 was the growth in time spent consuming podcasts, which increased from six hours last year to a bit over six hours and twenty minutes this year, which is almost a whole show for some people.
This is the number that I believe we can continue to drive. It’s more than just a “frequency” metric for selling spots – it’s a proxy for engagement and the importance of podcasting in people’s daily lives. While the majority of Americans 18+ classify as monthly podcast consumers, we can do a better job converting more of these to weekly, and even daily consumers of podcasting. I’ve noted this graph in the past:
…and the ratio of trial to regular usage, at 50% conversion, is a figure that I think we can do a lot better on. Certainly that ratio for streaming TV or streaming music is higher than 50%, and there is no reason why we can’t improve upon converting occasional users to daily users, and/or to increase the time these consumers spend with podcasts, particularly given the audio/video flexibility of the medium. After all, you can get podcasts on pretty much ANY app that you use daily.
So where is this growth to come from? Well, I offer this, blindingly obvious graph of weekly consumption in 2025 by demographic:
I even colored it orange for you so you wouldn’t miss it. With consumption easily exceeding six hours per week with men and ages 18-54, there is a HUGE opportunity to create a more meaningful footprint with women 55+. If I had ten pennies to spend on content creation, research, and marketing, I might spend four or five of them right there.
Growing that number with older women to six hours or more per week would unlock some really interesting averages across the board, and push the overall average closer to seven. That is an hour a day, friends, and that is often how people answer this question. If more people are answering it “an hour a day,” that is more people telling us that podcasting isn’t just a thing they sometimes do when they are bored, but a thing they do.
Now, the title of this article alluded to podcast revenue growth, and here is where that gets paid off. As we reported earlier this year in our Advertising Landscape series, podcasting is the ONE ad-supported medium that leads in attracting attention to ads with both men AND women. In fact, it’s the best medium to attract attention from women, period:
Furthermore, as noted in our report on Attention and Trust, podcasting is the most trusted ad-supported platform with Americans 55+ in terms of the people bringing you advertising messages (significantly higher than any social media platform) and performs at or near the very top with trust in content and advertising claims with older demographics as well.
That means growing not just reach, but engagement with older women could have a force-multiplier effect on overall advertising performance (from the perspective of a buyer, certainly). If as an industry we can do a better job researching, creating content for, and marketing to women over 55, and take some of their low-attention media time away and shunt it into nutritious and delicious podcasts, that could make a noticeable difference in conversions and brand measures for the right brand.
I do hope we get to a point in the podcast industry where we are doing as much content research as we are sales research, because that is the key to really unlocking this massive and lucrative market for podcasting. Many times in both advertising and content creation, what gets made in a vacuum is a reflection of who is in the room, so we start with the room.
I do want to leave you with something more actionable, though, since you read and subscribe and share this newsletter every week and I love you to bits. An underdeveloped category with this segment (and several others) is TV and Film podcasts. Whether we are talking about shows featuring the creators of movies and TV, shows about shows, or rewatch shows, the hypothetical demand for this content far outstrips the performance. There are also some other unique benefits to this category, and I am going to unpack all of that with the assistance of Hernan Lopez of Owl & Co. in next week’s article.
Yes, you remember Hernan as the founder of Wondery, and he is doing some very intriguing work on both streaming TV and (of course) podcasts, and he and I are going to collaborate on a special on-demand webinar and report next week on the potential of TV and Film podcast content. No registration necessary – it will all be in the next newsletter. So: like, subscribe, share, poke, caress, or whatever you need to do to be back here in this space next week!
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