Podcasting is bigger than ever—but not without its growing pains

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On August 4, Amazon announced that it was restructuring its Wondery podcast studio. The company’s CEO and about 110 employees are leaving. Those who remain are being divvied between Amazon’s audiobook arm Audible and a new group called Creator Services, reported The New York Times’s Jessica Testa.

Observers, including my colleague Grace Snelling, connected Amazon’s reevaluation of Wondery’s future with YouTube’s emergence as, arguably, podcasting’s dominant platform. As of October 2024, according to Edison Research, the video giant had more podcast listeners than Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Calling podcast fans “listeners” may already be an anachronism, though: In February of this year, YouTube itself claimed 1 billion podcast viewers.

Overall, says Edison, Americans spend 773 million hours per week consuming podcasts, up more than 350% in a decade. That translates into 7.7 hours per week per podcast consumer.

The medium has changed tremendously in those 10 years. Back in 2015, the hottest podcast was the spellbinding true-crime show Serial, which won a Peabody Award that April after debuting in October 2014. It proved that podcasting—like terrestrial radio in its pre-TV golden age—could conjure up a “theater of the mind.” A podcast could keep you on the edge of your seat, maybe even more so because you provided the visuals yourself.

In Serial’s wake, plenty of compelling narrative podcasts did emerge. Still, the field always seemed a little stunted. True crime provided a disproportionate percentage of shows, as you can tell from the titles of such Wondery series as Dr. Death, Killer Privilege, Morbid, American Scandal, and Blood and Vines. As engrossing as tales of murder and scandal can be, I expected more kinds of stories to emerge over time.

Instead, storytelling in general has been on the wane. Podcasting is now awash in talking heads—hosts gabbing with guests about a given topic, most often relating to current events. I’m not knocking shows dedicated to discussion of news of the day: I consume scads of them and appear on my share. Yet I do feel a twinge of sadness that they’ve overwhelmed other types of programming. A medium capable of anything has morphed into a giant talk show.

This trend helps explain why podcasts have become so important to YouTube, and vice versa. As the medium has focused on conversation, it’s become typified by hosts who are glib and charismatic, such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy, and Armchair Expert’s Dax Shepard. You don’t have to like all of them to acknowledge that they’re vivid personalities and good at expressing themselves in a memorable way. That gives them a lot in common with the creators who have long attracted mass audiences on YouTube.

Some audio-only podcasts are repurposed on YouTube without a real visual element. But the ones that feel at home are full-blown video productions. Sometimes, they’re shot with fancy equipment in a studio and meticulously edited; other times, their production values are reminiscent of a staff meeting held on Zoom. Either way, video podcasting’s popularity on YouTube shows that it can command attention—even if all you’re seeing is people sitting around and chatting.

Now, video podcasts are hardly new—I’ve somehow managed to hold on to a few I downloaded 15 years ago using Apple’s iTunes, which helped popularize podcasts in the first place. Apple’s present-day Podcasts app supports video as well. Meanwhile, Spotify has lately been beefing up its video experience, adding features such as the ability to flip back and forth between video Joe Rogan and audio-only Joe Rogan in mid-podcast.

Even so, the recent boom in video podcasting may have snuck up on the rest of the industry. And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s tough to beat YouTube at creating an environment that’s conducive to watching video.

App developers taking video at least as seriously as audio might be critical to the future of podcasting, a mode of communication that has thrived in part because it’s so open. There’s no vast content repository controlled by a single company; instead, podcast feeds run on RSS, which is why you can subscribe to all your favorite shows in the app of your choice. (From 2020 to 2024, when a deal reportedly worth $200 million made The Joe Rogan Experience exclusive to Spotify, it wasn’t a podcast by the strictest sense of the term.)

By its nature, RSS also respects privacy: Creators can tell how many downloads they’re getting, and can detect subscribers’ IP addresses, but they can’t use data on individual listeners for ad targeting or other purposes.

YouTube lets creators pipe RSS feeds of their podcasts onto the platform to automate their distribution. But a pedant might contend that they’re no longer podcasts once they get there. They’re just YouTube shows monetized via YouTube advertising, inhabiting a parallel universe distinct from RSS-powered podcasting as it exists in other apps. Which is why not all podcasts are available on YouTube and nobody assumes that every YouTube show will be available elsewhere.

Last year, Google doubled down on YouTube as its podcasting hub by discontinuing its own podcast app in favor of YouTube Music. As that app’s name indicates, it’s mostly a portal to stuff on YouTube. But it does let you subscribe to podcasts by plugging in their RSS feeds. That preserves a link to podcasting in its most open form, even if it’s more of a backup than the primary interface.

None of this matters much as long as the greater podcast ecosystem beyond YouTube remains viable. I’d be alarmed if YouTube started cutting exclusivity deals for popular podcasts, or if its position grew so commanding that creators just didn’t bother making their shows available elsewhere. So far, neither scenario is panning out.

Here’s hoping they never do. It’s fine for the lines between podcasting and YouTube to blur a bit—as long as they don’t fade away altogether.

You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.

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