By Todd Spangler
(YouTube Podcasts 1 Billion Users. Courtesy of YouTube)
Podcasts started as an audio-only phenomenon. But now YouTube — the world’s biggest video platform — might be the biggest platform for podcasts.
According to the Google-owned video giant, YouTube now has more than 1 billion monthly viewers for podcast content worldwide. In 2024, users watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living-room devices, the company said.
“This milestone underscores how YouTube has come to play an essential role in podcasting for creators and audiences, and how our investments to improve the podcast experience on YouTube are paying off,” YouTube said in an announcement. “Podcasts with video are more than just a trend, they meet audiences where they are: on YouTube.”
The growth of podcast consumption on YouTube comes after Google Podcasts was phased out in mid-2024. In the U.S., about 31% of weekly podcast listeners choose YouTube as their preferred service, over Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%), per Edison Podcast Metrics research released last October.
With 1 billion monthly podcast users, YouTube would be far bigger than Spotify, which all told had 675 million monthly active users at the end of 2024. Spotify doesn’t regularly report the size of its podcast audience; it recently said that more than 240 million users have ever streamed a video podcast on the service. Meanwhile, Apple doesn’t release user stats for Apple Podcasts.
“We’ve long invested in the podcast experience and creators have found that video makes this format even more compelling,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan wrote earlier this month in his annual letter to the YouTube community. “This year we’ll roll out more tools to support podcasters, improve monetization for creators, and make it even easier to discover podcasts.”
Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, is a tech reviewer and vlogger with almost 20 million subscribers on the platform. He co-hosts weekly tech podcast “Waveform” (aka “WVFRM”), part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, distributed on YouTube and via other platforms as audio-only podcasts.
“It was a no-brainer to make it a video-first podcast on YouTube,” Brownlee said. “There’s nothing like the content discoverability on YouTube. It kind of fit together like a puzzle piece with our other channels.”
Launched in August 2019, “Waveform” is hosted by Brownlee, who is known as MKBHD, and co-hosts Andrew Manganelli and David Imel. Brownlee said the podcast started as a place where he and collaborators could discuss weekly tech news and developments off his main YouTube channel, where his company publishes highly produced videos. He estimates that a typical MKBHD video takes about 20 hours of work, compared with 2 hours (plus editing time) for a podcast.
In 2024, one of the biggest podcasts on YouTube was Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump in late October, which currently has more than 56 million views.
In announcing the 1 billion viewer milestone, YouTube called out podcasts including “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer,” “Lex Fridman Podcast,” Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay,” Jason and Travis Kelco’s “New Heights,” and true-crime shows “Rotten Mango” and “Murder, Mystery and Make Up.”
Courtesy: https://www.niemanlab.org
