The Podcast Discovery Playbook 2026

The Podcast Discovery Playbook 2026

Is your podcast launch strategy based on outdated assumptions? Do your promotional channels line up with where your audience expects to find you? Then you need The Podcast Discovery Playbook,...

By Tom Webster

June 18, 2026

Sponsored by

Is your podcast launch strategy based on outdated assumptions?

Do your promotional channels line up with where your audience expects to find you? Then you need The Podcast Discovery Playbook, a granular look at how listeners actually find new podcasts, built from The Podcast Landscape, America’s largest publicly available study of podcast consumption.

This never-before-presented data will challenge your assumptions and leave you better positioned for discovery in an increasingly noisy content space. Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

  • Why “podcasting” is no longer one channel, one behavior, or one creative format, and why that single shift reorders almost everything about how you launch
  • How YouTube became the largest podcast app, and what that does to your format and packaging, not just your distribution checklist
  • The social channel split, and where organic reach ends and paid spend has to start
  • Five pieces of received wisdom the data no longer supports
  • Who your audience actually is, channel by channel, because the people TikTok sent you are not the people Spotify sent you, and they need different creative
  • A pre-launch playbook: distinct channel mixes, the word-of-mouth layer almost nobody builds, and why discovery is a 12-month system, not a 12-week push