Podcasts have officially surpassed AM/FM talk radio as the most popular medium for spoken word audio in the United States, according to Edison Research Share of Ear Survey.
Researchers tracked these statistics over the past decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken word radio broadcasts decreased. For the first time this year, podcasts overtook spoken word radio with 40% of listening time, compared to 39% for radio.
If anything, it’s surprising that it took this long for podcasts to overtake radio broadcasts. (Remember, this doesn’t include listening to music on the radio.) But perhaps that says more about the endurance of good, old-fashioned radio than the merits of podcasting.
We checked with Edison to see if those stats include video podcasts, and they do. However, the need to clarify this question points to the undeniable growing prevalence of video podcasts, hosted on platforms such as Spotify and YouTube, which signals another key trend in podcasting.
Perhaps an industry leader, Netflix is inking deals with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports to bring podcasts to the streaming service as a more modern version of the daytime talk show. Not a bad investment — according to YouTube, people watch them on TV. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours podcasts every month in 2025 on living room devices such as TVs, up from 400 million last year.
However, the popularity of video podcasts doesn’t seem to be dampening first-audio podcast listening.
Triton Digital’s US Podcast Report 2025 showed that 80% of consumers over the age of 18 tune in to audio and video podcasts. 13% only listen to audio, while 7% only watch video. Listener preferences also seem to vary significantly by podcast genre, with podcasts on topics such as music, sports, comedy and news being more popular than video. Genres such as science, history, art, fantasy and true crime are most often consumed through audio.
Edison’s findings show a similar trend in the role of video in podcasting. Eighty-five percent of weekly US podcast listeners over the age of 13 consume podcasts with some kind of video component, a 7% increase from 2023. The survey also found that there are an estimated 115 million weekly podcast listeners in the US, with only 5% of listeners reporting that they watch podcasts but don’t listen to them.
