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Podcasts have officially surpassed AM/FM talk radio as the most popular medium for spoken audio in the United States, according to Ear share survey conducted by Edison Research.
Researchers have tracked these statistics over the past decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spend listening to podcasts has increased, while their time on spoken-word radio has decreased. For the first time this year, podcasts overtook 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 shows. (Remember, this does not include listening to music on the radio.) But perhaps this speaks more to the durability of good old-fashioned radio than to the merits of podcasting.
We checked with Edison to see if these stats include video podcasts, and they do. But the need to clarify this question points to the undeniable growing prevalence of podcasting over video, hosted on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, which represents another major trend in podcasting.
Netflix may be the industry leader, inking deals with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports Bring your podcasts to your streaming service As a more modern version of the daytime talk show. It’s not a bad investment – according to YouTube, people watch it on TV. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours of podcasts each month in 2025 on living room devices, such as TVs, up from 400 million the previous year.
But the popularity of video podcasts doesn’t seem to detract from listening to audio podcasts first.
Triton Digital US Podcast Report 2025 Show that 80% of consumers over the age of 18 listen to both audio and video files; 13% only listen to audio, while 7% only watch video. Listener preferences also appear to vary greatly depending on the type of podcast, with podcasts on topics such as music, sports, comedy, and news being more popular over video. Genres such as science, history, arts, fantasy, and true crime are often consumed via 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 any type of video component, up 7% from 2023. The research also showed that there are an estimated 115 million weekly podcast listeners in the US, with only 5% of listeners reporting that they watch podcasts, but do not listen to them.