YouTube reaches 1 Bn monthly podcast users making it the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the US. As of the 1st January 2025 there were more than 1 Bn monthly active viewers of podcast content on YouTube and often the first place people go when looking for a new podcast.
Podcasts on YouTube and YouTube Music are available on every kind of device including TVs. Last year, viewers watched over 400M hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices.
Examples of “must see” and “must hear” shows on YouTube include everything from “talk shows” like Club Shay Shay and New Heights, to true-crime genre-benders like Rotten Mango and Murder, Mystery and Make Up.
The other main podcast platforms, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, do not publish regular updates on their podcast user base. Edison Podcast Metrics who did the research into the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the US put the share of users as YouTube at 31%, Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15% of weekly users.
Spotify last published its podcast statistics in September 2023 when it said that there were ‘over half a billion people who have listened to at least one podcast on Spotify since 2019’. In their Q4 2024 financial results no figures were given for the number of podcast users but did say they have 6.5 million podcasts on their platform.
Apple Podcasts are even less forthcoming about its user base but figures released in February 2022 put the number of monthly users at 28.5 million and this was projected to grow to 29.2 million by 2025.
In the UK, BBC Sounds reported that it had a total of 214 million downloads of BBC podcasts around the world in Q4 2024 but there is no information on how many users this represents.
