Americans Listen to Podcasts More Than Talk Radio Now, Study Shows

Source: Slashdot

Overview

“Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken‑word audio in the United States,” reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey:

The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken‑radio broadcasts decreased. For the first time this year, podcasts eclipsed spoken‑word radio with 40 % of listening time, as opposed to 39 % for radio.

We checked with Edison to see if these statistics include video podcasts, and they do. The need to clarify that question points to the undeniable growing prevalence of video podcasts, hosted on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, which marks another key trend in podcasting. YouTube reported that 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.

Source: Slashdot