Video podcasts may grab headlines, but audio is far from surrendering its loyal fans. Exclusive listeners still outnumber exclusive watchers nearly two to one, and traditional radio companies continue to rank among the medium’s heaviest hitters, per 2025 data.
Podcasting reached 53.6% of the US population monthly in 2025, according to Triton Digital’s annual US Podcast Report. The findings draw on IAB Tech Lab-certified metrics, data from leading hosting platforms, and surveys of more than 12,000 monthly listeners.
While 13% of the monthly audience listens exclusively, and 7% watches exclusively, the remaining 80% of the audience now does both. Exclusive audio listeners skew older, more female, and higher income. Science, history, fiction, arts, and true crime hold the strongest listen-only consumption shares, with science leading at 58% audio-only.
Those genres also tend toward longer runtimes, suggesting committed ears rather than casual screens.
Platform preference continues its steady shift toward YouTube, which climbed to 37.7% as the most-used podcast platform in 2025, up from 28.1% in 2022. Apple Podcasts dropped to 11.3% over the same period. But platform preference and download behavior diverge sharply: YouTube’s rise reflects casual and video-driven consumption, while Apple’s RSS dominance reflects the habitual, subscription-based listening behavior that has always defined podcasting’s core audience. Apple may gain ground in 2026 following its announcement that video podcast capabilities will soon be coming to its app.
Spotify attracts the youngest platform audience, with 49% of its listeners aged 18–34. Apple Podcasts reaches the highest-income users, with 42% earning over $100,000 annually.
Per Triton, radio-rooted companies enjoyed some of the greatest success. iHeart Audience Network led all sales networks with 69.0 million average weekly downloads, followed by NPR at 27.2 million, and Audacy at 14.8 million.
By total downloads across all platforms, NPR News Now ranked as the most-downloaded podcast in the US for 2025. Nine of the top 20 podcasts by downloads are news programs, a genre that averages 37 minutes per episode and indexes heavily toward audio-first consumption. Up First from NPR placed second, with Stuff You Should Know, distributed through iHeart Audience Network, ranking third.
Survey reach, which factors in both listening and watching, tells a different story. The Joe Rogan Experience ranked first by that measure, followed by The Daily and Crime Junkie. The divergence between download rankings and survey reach illustrates how video exposure inflates perceived audience size for certain shows while dedicated audio programs continue to build the deepest download bases.
