Are podcasts declining in popularity? No, but listener habits have shifted. Reach is flat to up depending on the survey, US ad revenue hit a record $2.86 billion in 2025, and the growth now comes from people who watch as well as listen, with YouTube as the top platform.
Podcast listening by year keeps rising on The Infinite Dial, the long-running US survey from Edison Research. Both 2025 and 2026 set all-time highs, and the last real dip was in 2022.
Two cautions most articles miss. The question changed in 2025 from listened to listened or watched, and 7 of the 8 points gained that year came from people who only watched. The 2026 sample also changed, from 5,020 people by phone and online to 2,050 online. Comparing the listening question alone, monthly listening still rose from 47% in 2024 to about 51% in 2026.
Podcasts are not becoming less popular on any major survey, though the surveys disagree about how strong the growth is. Edison reports records. Sounds Profitable, surveying 5,473 US adults in August 2026, says "Reach has changed very little since 2024." Pew found 54% of US adults listened in the past year, up from 49% in 2022, and calls that a slight increase. Both of the first two agree on direction, so flat to up is the fair summary.
| Survey | Who | Monthly | Weekly | One-year change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edison, The Infinite Dial | US, 12 and up, January | 58% | 45% | Up 3 and up 5 points |
| Sounds Profitable, The Podcast Landscape | US adults, August | 55% | 39% | Up 1 and up 1 point |
Podcast habits have shifted away from audio-only apps and toward watching. The people who both listen and watch grew from 30% to 36% of Americans monthly between 2025 and 2026, while the listen-only group fell from 18% to 15%, by Edison's figures.
The platform numbers show the same move. YouTube is the platform 39% of weekly consumers use most, up from 33% a year earlier, with Spotify at 20% and Apple at 11%. On Sounds Profitable, podcast-native apps fell from 19% to 15% as the most-used platform, partly because that survey added Netflix and other options to its list. People who stick to audio didn't go anywhere, though. Weekly consumers who didn't watch spent 4.8 hours a week in both 2025 and 2026, which is the honest version of a plateau.
Video podcasts and audio podcasts now share one audience more than they compete for two. YouTube says it has more than 1 billion monthly podcast users, and viewers watched over 700 million hours on living room devices in October 2025, up from 400 million a year before. On Sounds Profitable, 44% of consumers watched a video podcast in the past week and only 17% of Americans expect a podcast to be audio only. Short clips get a lot of credit too, but no primary source measures them yet, and YouTube's own chart leaves them out. If you are starting a show, SEO in podcasts now means YouTube first.
Podcasts are actually slipping in three places, and each is worth watching. Time is one: mean hours among weekly consumers fell from 6.3 to 5.7 on Sounds Profitable, though the median held at 4.0. Churn is another: 34% of people who have ever consumed a podcast started in the past year, up from 28%, yet reach barely moved, so about as many are leaving. Young reach is the third: monthly reach among 12 to 34 year olds fell from 66% to 64% on Edison, a drop small enough to be noise.
The supply of new shows has fallen hard. Podchaser counted 153,767 new shows worldwide in the first half of 2026, down 14% and the lowest first half in eight years, and 41.7% of them had already stopped by the end of June. Listen Notes puts about 29% of Q3 2026 launches as AI-generated. Fewer shows starting isn't the same as fewer people listening, and the 2020 boom set a very high bar. The 12 SEO podcasts on the SEO TV shelf all released an episode in October 2026.
How many podcasts are still active is a much smaller number than the headline totals. Podcast Index lists 4,749,876 shows, and only 466,549 published in the last 90 days. On Apple, shows with a new episode in 90 days fell from 755,715 in June 2021 to 436,240 in November 2025, then recovered to 482,930 in June 2026. So the crowd is thinner than it looks, and it has grown again this year.
Some scary numbers turn out to be measurement. Podtrac found downloads per show fell 15.2% from February 2023 to February 2024, but episodes from the last seven days fell just 3%. The pattern fits a change in iOS 17 that cut automatic back catalog downloads, so fewer files moved without fewer people listening.
Podcast ad money is not falling, and it grew 17.6% in 2025 to $2,862.2 million, according to the IAB and PwC. That is up from $1,825.3 million in 2022, and it still counts only about 1% of US digital ad revenue. The report uses a traditional audio definition, so video money on YouTube mostly sits outside it. For what that means for one show, see how podcasts make money.
The percent of Gen Z who listen to podcasts is roughly two in three, depending on the survey and the age band: 64% of 12 to 34 year olds in a typical month on Edison, and 67% of 18 to 29 year olds over a year on Pew. No single current Gen Z figure exists. The older Edison Gen Z report put monthly reach at 47% of 13 to 24 year olds in 2023.
Sources for this answer were checked on Nov 1, 2026.
More SEO and podcast questions from the same counter.