Podcasting Hit a Billion Accounts, Not a Billion Listeners
You’re going to hear that podcasting is approaching a billion users. New MIDiA Research data puts the number at about 965 million. It’s a gross figure, so anyone who uses more than one platform is likely counted twice. It tells you how big the venues are getting, not how many people are in your audience.
The smaller numbers matter more. In 2025, YouTube added 27 million podcast users. Spotify added 10.8 million. Apple added 2 million. Discovery is moving, and YouTube is now one of the strongest discovery engines podcasting has.
That raises a question I think most podcasters skip. Where does your podcast live? Is home the RSS feed? The web site? The newsletter? Or the YouTube channel?
A podcast has three jobs that tend to get lumped together: being found, being listened to, and holding a relationship. YouTube is great at the first. Audio apps handle the second. The feed is the most portable thing you own, but it tells you almost nothing about who’s on the other end. Only an email list or a site you control lets you reach someone next week without asking a platform’s permission.
That’s the test I’d use. If you can’t reach your audience next week on your own, you don’t have a home. You have a presence.
What counts as home depends on what the show is for. A branded or B2B show built to earn credibility probably lives on the website and the newsletter, with everything else as distribution. A show that sells ads lives wherever its numbers are easiest to sell. A show that exists to position its host might treat the newsletter as home and every platform as a front door.
There’s no single answer. Pick your home the way you’d pick any business address: by what the show is there to do.
How People Audition Your Podcast First
Nearly nine in ten listeners say a sample helps them choose. In The Podcast Study, a survey of about 1,200 U.S. podcast listeners, 47% said hearing or seeing a short sample would definitely increase their chances of trying a show, and another 42% said it probably would. Clips seem to be doing much of that work: 65% typically see at least two before trying something new.
Here’s something though… listeners credit formal trailers with just 3% of discovery, according to Tom Webster’s Podcast Discovery Playbook 2026. YouTube gets 40%.
I read that this way: sampling is real, but it’s happening in clips and video feeds, not in the trailer you uploaded.
And once they press play, you don’t have long. 41% say they decide within five minutes whether to keep listening.
Treat your best clip as your real trailer, and make sure your opening delivers exactly what it’s promising.
Podcast Listening is Still an “At Home” Experience
No matter where you are in the world, podcasting is still mostly an at home experience. Canada, the US, the UK, the numbers all say the same thing: listeners press play from the couch, not the car. Remember to design your episodes that way shaped around the listener’s journey.
Slumping Dax Shepard and Understanding Podcast Churn
is one of the best journalists in podcasting. She writes about the slumping popularity of Dax Shepard’s show “Armchair Expert,” in this LinkedIn post.
For me, this is clear sign of podcast churn. People find you, like you, maybe even become addicted to you, but eventually they get tired of you when they recognize your pattern and you become too predictable so they leave you. We spend so much time at the front end on discovery we often forget about the back end… keeping them. Ashley is always worth the full article which you can find here. Much more depth in the full piece.
Your podcast could be stolen and monetized without your knowledge
at has uncovered 1,778 podcasts copied onto Spreaker without permission. The platform allows users to duplicate shows, republish them, and earn advertising revenue, leaving original creators without the downloads or income.
Spreaker says it doesn’t condone copyright infringement, but serious questions remain about its safeguards.
Full credit to James Cridland and Podnews for breaking this story.
Insights from Calgary PodSummit
flew to Calgary for PodSummit week before last expecting the usual AI chatter and found almost none of it, which he didn’t miss. What he heard instead was worry about discovery, especially after reported that Apple Podcasts swapped its country curated view for an algorithmic one (Apple says nothing has changed, so treat it as reported).
Signal Hill Insights showed that 40% of Canadians listen to Canadian podcasts, down from 43% last year, and I’d want the margin of error before reading much into three points.
Matt also came away convinced that podcast promotion has become a steady diet of captioned clips, and that radio’s old instinct for branding and production is the better answer.
My takeaway is that if a platform stops introducing your show, a promo that sounds like everyone else’s won’t either, so make one this month that sounds unmistakably like you.
Other Stuff
@Beehiiv is adding dynamically inserted ads. You may or may not advertise in your podcast but dynamic inserts are a great way to make listeners aware of your upcoming masterclasses and events