Podcast Statistics 2026: 60 Stats on Listeners and Revenue

Key Takeaways

• Monthly US podcast reach hit 58% in 2026, an all-time high, and 45% of Americans 12+ consumed a podcast in the last week (Edison Research, Infinite Dial 2026).
• “Podcast” no longer means one thing. The IAB counts 2025 revenue on the traditional audio definition while noting video is now the leading channel for podcast consumption (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).
• Video is stacked on top of audio, not replacing it. 80% of the monthly US podcast audience aged 18+ both watched and listened, and only 7% watched without listening (Triton Digital, U.S. Podcast Report 2025).
• US podcast ad revenue reached \$2.86 billion in 2025, up 17.6%, still under 1% of US internet ad revenue (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).
• The median podcast gets 27 downloads per episode in its first week, and 407 puts a show in the top 10% (Buzzsprout, August 2026).
• Supply is shrinking while fakes pile up. Listen Notes removed 60,277 AI-generated fake podcasts in twelve months, while new human-made shows fell from 20,204 in January 2026 to 8,109 in August (Listen Notes).

How Many Podcasts Are There in 2026

It depends who’s counting and what they refuse to count, and that disagreement is the story of podcast measurement this year.

Total Podcast Count by Database and Country

Listen Notes counts 3.82 million podcasts, and I’d quote that over bigger totals because it strips out dead and fake feeds.

• There are 3,815,508 podcasts and 194,605,820 episodes in the world (Listen Notes, dataset updated 19 September 2026).
• Podcast Index, which filters less aggressively, lists 4,732,210 feeds, and Listen Notes says rival databases inflate their counts with deleted, empty, AI-generated and PDF-only feeds (Podcast Index, 25 September 2026; Listen Notes).
• 2,407,812 podcasts originate in the United States, 63.1% of the catalogue, with Brazil second at 209,276 and Indonesia third at 145,570 (Listen Notes, share calculated from the published totals).

By language, 2,318,089 podcasts are in English, with Spanish second at 396,149 and Portuguese third at 221,859 (Listen Notes).

How Many Active Podcasts Are There

Most of the catalogue is dormant, which makes the success rate of a new podcast far lower than the headline count suggests.

• 556,588 podcasts have been active in 2026, 14.6% of the catalogue; the other 85.4% published nothing this year (Listen Notes, share calculated from the published totals).
• Launches peaked at 1,020,460 new shows in 2020, up from 335,101 in 2019, then fell to 751,425 in 2021 and 252,716 in 2022 (Listen Notes).
• Launches have held near 200,000 a year since: 237,292 in 2023, 200,970 in 2024 and 210,759 in 2025, with 108,004 in 2026 through mid-September (Listen Notes).
• Nearly one in six podcast consumers has tried making a podcast, and for every three who start, one stops (Sounds Profitable, The Creators 2025, 5,000+ respondents, November 2025).

New Human-Made Podcasts vs AI-Generated Fakes

New human-made shows have fallen every single month of 2026, and roughly a third of new submissions are synthetic.

• New human-made podcasts fell from 20,204 in January 2026 to 17,254 in February, 16,797 in March, 11,930 in April, 10,439 in May, 9,833 in June, 8,605 in July and 8,109 in August (Listen Notes).
• Listen Notes removed 60,277 AI-generated fake podcasts in the twelve months from September 2025 to August 2026 (Listen Notes, monthly figures summed).
• In February 2026 it rejected 8,147 AI fakes against 17,254 genuine new shows, and in August 3,637 of 11,746 new feeds were AI-generated, 31.0% against February’s 32.1% (Listen Notes).

Most Popular Podcast Genres and Hosting Platforms

The biggest genres by show count are not the ones that top the listening charts, and one free host carries more than half of all shows.

• Society and Culture is the largest podcast genre at 687,838 shows, followed by Education at 620,334 and Business at 470,942, while Comedy, which dominates the listening charts, is only seventh at 312,404 and Technology sits at 122,109 (Listen Notes).

• Anchor, now Spotify for Creators, hosts 2,010,117 podcasts, more than half of everything Listen Notes indexes; Buzzsprout hosts 256,121, Spreaker 149,169, Podbean 145,440, SoundCloud 125,351 and Libsyn 104,227 (Listen Notes).
• Buzzsprout alone had 112,207 active podcasts in August 2026, publishing 142,781 new episodes that generated 79,530,369 downloads (Buzzsprout).

If you’re choosing where to put a show, I’ve compared the platforms in our roundup of the best podcast hosting platforms, and there’s a separate list of no-cost hosting options if you want to test the format first.

How Many People Listen to Podcasts in 2026

US Podcast Reach Hits All-Time Highs

Every Edison reach measure set a record in 2026, and monthly listening has grown far faster than awareness since 2020.

• 80% of Americans aged 12 and over, roughly 230 million people, have ever listened to or watched a podcast (Edison Research at SSRS, Infinite Dial 2026, n=2,050 aged 12+).
• 58%, about 167 million, consumed a podcast in the last month and 45%, about 130 million, in the last week, both all-time highs (Infinite Dial 2026).
• In 2020, 75% of Americans 12+, approximately 212 million people, were familiar with podcasting, up from 70% in 2019, while monthly listening stood at 37%, or 104 million (Edison Research and Triton Digital, Infinite Dial 2020).

Podcast Listener Demographics by Age

Podcasts skew young in Triton’s data and middle-aged in Edison’s, and both put the over-55s well behind.

• Triton Digital measured monthly podcast reach at 53.6% of the total US population, and at 68.7% among 18 to 34 year olds, 62.1% among 35 to 54s and 35.0% among the over-55s (Triton Digital, U.S. Podcast Report 2025, Q2 2025).
• Edison found 68% of 35 to 54 year olds consumed a podcast in the last month, against 64% of 12 to 34s and 44% of the over-55s (Edison Research at SSRS, Infinite Dial 2026 presentation).

Edison and Triton disagree by roughly four points on monthly reach because they are different surveys, and Triton changed its question in 2025 to count audio or video consumption (Triton Digital, U.S. Podcast Report 2025). Both are defensible.

Online Audio and AI Users

Podcasting sits inside an online audio habit that reaches four in five Americans, and AI users listen far more than everyone else.

• 81% of Americans 12+, about 233 million, listened to online audio in the last month and 76%, about 219 million, in the last week, and monthly online audio among Americans 55+ jumped from 52% in 2024 to 70% in 2026 (Infinite Dial 2026).
• Nine in ten Americans 12+ have used YouTube, 84% use it monthly and 78% weekly (Infinite Dial 2026).
• 57% of Americans 12+ have used a generative AI assistant and 93% know at least one generative AI brand, a level of awareness Edison notes podcasting has not reached in twenty years; 87% of AI users listened to online audio in the last week against 61% of non-users (Infinite Dial 2026).
• More than half of generative AI users are weekly podcast consumers, against roughly a third of people who don’t use AI (Infinite Dial 2026).

That AI-user cut is the one I’d use if you sell software: the people evaluating AI tools are the heaviest podcast audience there is.

Podcast Listening Habits: Time, Apps and Devices

Time Spent Listening to Podcasts

Heavy listeners carry the medium, and Edison’s heaviest cohort averages more than eleven hours a week.

• Weekly podcast listeners spent a mean of 7 hours 43 minutes a week with podcasts, and 23% spent 10 or more hours (Edison Research, The Podcast Consumer 2024, 2024).
• Edison’s Super Listeners, US adults 18+ who listen to five or more hours a week, averaged 11.2 hours, and 53% of them said their opinion of a company improves when it advertises on a podcast they listen to, and 56% said a podcast ad made them more likely to buy than an ad anywhere else (Edison Research and Ad Results Media, Podcasting’s Super Listeners 2021).

The 2021 edition of this page put the number of avid US podcast fans at roughly 16 million. Edison’s Super Listeners cohort above is the closest thing Edison has measured.

Podcasts’ Share of Audio Listening Time

Podcasts have taken a real slice of listening time, but AM/FM radio still dominates ad-supported audio.

• Podcasts took 10% of all time Americans 13+ spent with audio in Q1 2026 and 16% of ad-supported audio time (Edison Research at SSRS, The Podcast Consumer 2026, Share of Ear Q1 2026, a base that now counts video podcasts), against 11% and 20% in the Q2 2023 to Q1 2024 reading and 2% in 2014 (Edison Research, The Podcast Consumer 2024), while in July 2026 AM/FM radio held 62% of ad-supported audio time among Americans 18+, against ad-supported Spotify’s 6% (Edison Research at SSRS, Share of Ear, July 2026).

Share of Ear is a one-day listening diary fielded to 1,000 respondents aged 13+ each quarter (Edison Research at SSRS), so treat any single share as a small-sample reading.

Top Podcast Listening Apps

Apple Podcasts still leads Spotify on downloads from Buzzsprout-hosted shows, which skew independent and smaller.

• Apple Podcasts took 35.8% of Buzzsprout downloads in August 2026, 28,469,589 of them, and Spotify took 28.8%, or 22,921,480 (Buzzsprout).
• Web browsers took 7.2%, Buzzsprout’s own player 3.5%, Castbox 1.9%, Overcast 1.7% and Pocket Casts 1.3% (Buzzsprout).
• Podcast Addict took 1.1%, while Amazon Music, iHeartRadio and Amazon Echo each sat below 1% (Buzzsprout).
• Ask listeners instead of counting downloads and YouTube wins: 31% of US weekly podcast listeners 13+ use it most, ahead of Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15% (Edison Research, Edison Podcast Metrics, October 2024).

What Devices People Use and Where They Listen

Podcasts are a phone habit, an iPhone habit in particular, and half of all downloads come from the US.

• 61.8% of Buzzsprout downloads came from an Apple iPhone in August 2026 and 22.4% from Android phones (Buzzsprout).
• 85.0% of downloads went to a mobile device, 8.0% to a computer, 0.6% to a smart speaker and 0.2% to a smart TV (Buzzsprout).
• The United States generated 52.0% of downloads, the UK 5.7%, Canada 4.4%, Australia 4.0%, Germany 3.0% and the Netherlands 2.7% (Buzzsprout).

How to See How Many Listeners a Podcast Has

You can’t see another show’s audience directly; hosts publish downloads, and a download is a file request, not a person finishing an episode.

• Every Buzzsprout figure on this page complies with version 2.2 of the IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines, which is what makes numbers from different hosts comparable (Buzzsprout).
• Triton Digital’s Podcast Metrics is certified by the IAB Tech Lab to the same v2.2 standard, and Triton retired its monthly US download rankers after the June 2025 reporting period; its quarterly survey ranker uses 3,000 listeners per quarter, and its Demos+ product adds a yearly survey of 12,000 monthly US podcast listeners 18+ (Triton Digital).

Video Podcast Statistics and AI Podcasting Trends

How Many People Watch Video Podcasts

Four in five podcast consumers now watch as well as listen, and only a small minority watch without listening.

• 80% of the monthly US podcast audience 18+ both watched and listened, 13% listened only and 7% watched only (Triton Digital, U.S. Podcast Report 2025, Q2 to Q3 2025, 6,000+ listeners).
• 57% of Americans 12+ have both listened to and watched a podcast (Infinite Dial 2026).
• Roughly 71% of US podcast creators produced video versions of their shows in Sounds Profitable’s 2025 creator study (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025, citing Sounds Profitable).

Edison’s Megan Lazovick put it plainly: “Video isn’t replacing podcast audio. It’s expanding the tent.” (Infinite Dial 2026)

YouTube and Spotify Podcast Statistics

YouTube reports the biggest podcast audience, Spotify the fastest-growing video habit, and neither measures the way Edison does.

• YouTube reports more than 1 billion monthly podcast viewers, first published in February 2025 and repeated without an increase in May 2026 (YouTube; YouTube, May 2026).
• Viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on living room devices in October 2025, up from 400 million hours a year earlier, and Premium subscribers alone watched more than 800 million hours in April 2026 (YouTube; YouTube).
• More than 500 million users have streamed a video podcast on Spotify, up nearly 50% year on year (Spotify Investor Day, May 2026).
• Spotify reported 777 million monthly active users and 300 million Premium subscribers for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 (Spotify, Q2 2026 Form 6-K), up from 751 million and 290 million at the end of 2025 (Spotify, Q4 2025 Form 6-K).

Spotify’s Q4 2025 report credited a record 38 million net user additions in the quarter and named video podcast costs as the main drag on Premium gross margin (Spotify, Q4 2025 Form 6-K).

YouTube has never published how it decides a video is a podcast, and Spotify stopped reporting podcast users separately in 2023, so neither number compares cleanly with Edison’s survey.

AI Podcast Tools Growth

The biggest AI audio numbers come from the companies selling the tools, and the money has moved fast.

• Google’s NotebookLM was renamed Gemini Notebook in July 2026, when Google disclosed more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organisations using it (Google).
• Users generated more than 350 years’ worth of Audio Overviews in the three months after the September 2024 launch, and the feature reached more than 50 languages in April 2025 (Google; Google).
• ElevenLabs raised \$500 million in February 2026 at an \$11 billion valuation, closed 2025 above \$330 million in annual recurring revenue and has raised \$781 million across five rounds (ElevenLabs), up from a \$3.3 billion valuation at its January 2025 Series C (ElevenLabs).
• YouTube opened auto-dubbing to all creators in February 2026 across 27 languages, and averaged more than 6 million daily viewers watching at least ten minutes of auto-dubbed content in December 2025 (YouTube).

Descript raised a \$50 million Series C led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in November 2022 (Descript). Adobe Podcast Studio added browser-based video recording and multi-track import from Zoom, Restream, StreamYard and Riverside (Adobe). If you’re assembling a stack, we keep current reviews of the best AI podcast recording software, the best AI podcast editing software and podcast transcription services.

AI-Generated Podcasts on Spotify and Apple

Spotify now generates podcasts itself, and neither big platform says how much of its catalogue is synthetic.

Spotify’s Q2 2026 report announced Personal Podcasts, AI-generated episodes with a set number of monthly credits in Premium, and Studio by Spotify Labs, a desktop app that builds personalised audio (Spotify, Q2 2026 Form 6-K). Spotify’s only AI-slop removal disclosure, from September 2025, covers music exclusively, and neither Spotify nor Apple has published a figure for AI-generated podcasts (Spotify).

Podcast Advertising Statistics and Revenue Growth

US Podcast Ad Revenue by Year

US podcast ad revenue has grown every year for a decade, and 2024 was the acceleration year.

• US podcast advertising revenue reached \$2,862.2 million in 2025, up 17.6% year on year (IAB and PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report Full-Year 2025).
• The series started at \$105.7M in 2015, then \$169.1M in 2016, \$313.9M in 2017 and \$479.1M in 2018 (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).
• It reached \$708.1M in 2019, \$842.3M in 2020, \$1,448.7M in 2021 and \$1,825.3M in 2022 (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).
• Growth slowed to 5.5% in 2023 at \$1,925.2M, then jumped 26.4% to \$2,433.1M in 2024 (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2024).

Podcast Ads as a Share of US Digital Advertising

Podcasting is a real business and still a rounding error next to the rest of US digital advertising, partly because the IAB counts only audio. Its report uses “the traditional, audio-based definition of a ‘podcast'” while noting it “is rapidly expanding as video becomes the leading channel for podcast consumption” (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).

• Total US internet advertising revenue was \$294.6 billion in 2025, up 13.9%, and US digital audio reached \$8.4 billion, up 10.2% (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).
• Podcast advertising is 0.97% of US internet ad revenue: \$2.86 billion against \$294.6 billion (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025, share calculated from the report’s totals).
• Owl and Co put the global podcast economy at \$9.2 billion in 2025, up 23%, built from more than 300,000 data points across 1,600 publishers (Owl and Co).
• Spotify paid out more than \$100 million to podcast publishers and podcasters in the first quarter of 2025, covering ad revenue and the Spotify Partner Program (Spotify).

Podcast Ad Rates, CPM and Ad Load

A 60-second host-read ad is worth nearly double the programmatic rate, and ad loads rose again in Q2 2026.

• Baked-in host-read ads run \$24 to \$26 CPM for a 60-second spot and \$18 to \$22 for 30 seconds, against \$18 to \$22 for dynamically inserted ads and \$12 to \$15 for programmatic (Libsyn Ads).
• Host-read rates by category run Business \$30, Health and Fitness \$27, Technology and Education \$26 each, Fiction \$24, Science, Comedy and Society and Culture \$23 each, and Games and Leisure \$22 (Libsyn Ads).
• Podcast ad spend grew 23% year on year in Q2 2026, after 32% in Q4 2025; 1,297 brands advertised on podcasts for the first time in Q2 2026, against 1,482 in Q4 2025, and average ad load reached 8.75% of episode time, up from 8.25% in Q1 (Magellan AI, Q2 2026; Magellan AI, Q4 2025).

Libsyn prices a show on downloads in its first 30 days, and cost is reach multiplied by CPM divided by 1,000 (Libsyn Ads). If monetisation is the reason you’re reading this, we’ve got a fuller breakdown of how to make money with your podcast.

Podcast Download Statistics: What Good Looks Like

This is the section to read before anyone tells you your show is underperforming.

Average Podcast Downloads Per Episode

The median podcast gets a few dozen downloads per episode, which is why an average is a useless benchmark in this medium.

• The median Buzzsprout podcast gets 27 downloads per episode in the first seven days, and 96 puts a show in the top 25% (Buzzsprout, August 2026).
• 407 downloads is the top-10% threshold, 1,003 the top-5% threshold and 4,526 the top-1% threshold (Buzzsprout).

The top-1% threshold is roughly 168 times the median, 4,526 first-week downloads against 27 (Buzzsprout, ratio calculated from the published thresholds). That spread is why I’d benchmark a new show against the median, never the mean.

Average Podcast Episode Length and Publishing Frequency

Buzzsprout’s shows cluster around 20 to 40 minutes and a weekly or fortnightly schedule.

• 31% of episodes run 20 to 40 minutes, 21% come in under 10 minutes and 13% run over an hour (Buzzsprout).
• 37% of shows publish every 8 to 14 days, 34% every 3 to 7 days and only 7% every 0 to 2 days (Buzzsprout).

Getting found is its own problem, and our roundup of where to submit a show is where I’d start.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people listen to podcasts in 2026?

58% of Americans aged 12 and over, about 167 million people, consumed a podcast in the last month, and 45%, roughly 130 million, in the last week (Edison Research, Infinite Dial 2026). Both are all-time highs for the series.

How many podcasts are there?

3,815,508, holding 194,605,820 episodes, according to Listen Notes’ 19 September 2026 dataset (Listen Notes). Podcast Index counts 4,732,210 as of 25 September 2026 because it filters less aggressively (Podcast Index). Only 556,588 Listen Notes shows had published anything in 2026 (Listen Notes).

What are good stats for a podcast?

27 downloads in the first seven days is the median on Buzzsprout as of August 2026, 96 puts you in the top quarter, 407 in the top 10% and 4,526 in the top 1% (Buzzsprout). An “average” download figure describes a distribution so skewed that the mean is meaningless.

Are podcasts still popular in 2026?

Listening is at a record: 58% monthly reach (Infinite Dial 2026) and US ad revenue up 17.6% to \$2.86 billion in 2025 (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025). Creation is not: new human-made shows fell from 20,204 in January to 8,109 in August 2026 (Listen Notes).

What is the success rate of a podcast?

Low if success means staying alive. Only 556,588 of 3,815,508 podcasts, 14.6%, published anything in 2026 (Listen Notes), and for every three consumers who start a podcast, one stops (Sounds Profitable, The Creators 2025).

Who is the highest-paid podcaster?

Joe Rogan, at an estimated \$82 million for June 2025 to June 2026, ahead of TBPN at \$70 million, on Forbes’ highest-paid podcasters list (Forbes, The Highest-Paid Podcasters Of 2026, July 2026). The Joe Rogan Experience also tops Edison’s Q2 2026 US ranking by reach, ahead of Crime Junkie and The Daily (Edison Research at SSRS, Top 50 Podcasts Q2 2026).

How much do podcast ads cost?

Baked-in host-read ads run \$24 to \$26 CPM for 60 seconds and \$18 to \$22 for 30 seconds on Libsyn’s rate card, Business shows command \$30, and programmatic runs \$12 to \$15 (Libsyn Ads). Cost is reach multiplied by CPM divided by 1,000.

Is video now more important than audio for podcasts?

Not more important, just additional. 80% of the monthly US podcast audience 18+ both watched and listened, and only 7% watched without listening (Triton Digital, U.S. Podcast Report 2025). The IAB still measures revenue on the audio definition while acknowledging video has become the leading consumption channel (IAB and PwC, Full-Year 2025).