The Podcast Landscape is Sounds Profitable’s annual study of how Americans consume podcasts, based this year on a census-weighted survey of 5,473 US adults fielded in August 2026. Part One covers the core numbers: who consumes podcasts, how often, for how long, on which platforms and devices, and with whom. The topline: 74% of American adults have consumed a podcast, 55% did so in the past month, and 39% in the past week — essentially unchanged from 2025. What changed is everything around those numbers. In its first year carrying podcasts, Netflix became the third most-named podcast platform in America, behind YouTube and Spotify and ahead of Apple Podcasts. Meanwhile, the share of consumers who call a podcast-native app their most-used platform fell from 19% to 15%.
The rest of Part One tracks a medium reshaping itself inside a stable audience. Video consumption keeps growing — 44% of consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40%, and only 17% of Americans still expect a podcast to be audio-only. A third of consumers started within the past year. And podcasting is increasingly something people do together: 40% at least occasionally consume podcasts with other people. The full deck below has all of it, with year-over-year comparisons throughout. Parts Two and onward — covering discovery, advertising, content, and AI — will publish separately in the coming weeks.
