Every year podcasting gains listeners — but also loses them. While early listeners were fans of the medium, the space is growing ever more complex, with people dipping in and out of the medium for a single show or catching their favorite podcast in places creators never planned for. While there is no shortage of advice about how to grow a single podcast, how do we grow podcasting?
The Podcast Landscape 2025 Part One: Core Podcast Metrics
Every year podcasting gains listeners — but also loses them. While early listeners were fans of the medium, the space is growing ever more complex, with people dipping in and...
August 26, 2025
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For its second year running the Podcast Landscape is back and continues as the largest publicly-available study of podcast consumption in the US. With a sample of over 5,000 Americans 18+, The Podcast Landscape is designed to provide the industry’s most reliable audience estimates and directional data. With so much data, this year we’re dividing the report into themed parts focusing on different aspects of podcast audience behavior, with this first section looking specifically at core podcast metrics. Among the highlights:
- 55% of Americans have consumed a podcast in the past month
- The medium continues to index highly with 18-54s, and multicultural audiences. For monthly statistics, 65% of Hispanic audiences consume podcasts, APAC audiences come in at 66%, and 62% of Black audiences are podcast consumers.
- There has been significant movement in the perceptions of non-consumers that may lead to opportunities in podcasting. Year-over-year, audience expectations for what format a podcast might take has shifted from 5% away from “audio only” to “may be either audio or video,” suggesting audiences value choice in how they consume their podcasts.
- Choice is king, as YouTube and Spotify stats comparing audio and video consumption show just under half of YouTube video podcast consumers still largely consume podcast content as purely audio.
The study was conducted in partnership with Signal Hill Insights, and is made possible through the cooperation of Wondery, American Public Media, ESPN Podcasts, BetterHelp, SiriusXM Podcast Network, LibsynAds, Paramount, and NPR.
For this project, 5,034 Americans 18+ were sampled using a single, high quality online panel. Results were weighted to the latest US Census information.
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