YouTube had “1 billion podcast listeners” in Jan

The latest from our daily newsletter at podnews.net with Riverside. YouTube released a new headline datapoint, suggesting that

there were more than 1 billion viewers of podcast content a month in January. It also repeated that 400 million monthly hours of podcast watching were consumed on TV sets. Well, putting that 1 billion number in context, Spotify claimed just 120 million monthly podcast listeners in November. Apple Podcasts is likely to be even smaller in terms of monthly listeners, according to Podtrac, but Apple Podcasts had a significantly higher share of downloads.

Worth remembering, too, that a listener to a second of podcast content on YouTube, even automatically played content, will count towards the 1 billion figure. Irrespective of the amount of downloads they make or the amount of time they spend with podcasts, reach doesn't translate to time spent. However, Edison Research said in October 2024 that of all the podcast platforms, YouTube was used most often to listen to podcasts. Well, we wondered what YouTube considered a podcast to be.

A YouTube spokesperson told us that the company follows the lead of creators marking a playlist as a podcast when they upload. And the YouTube podcast homepage in the US, as one example, includes full TV news shows like NBC Nightly News and PBS NewsHour, which both broadcasters have marked as a podcast. But there are audio podcasts for NBC Nightly News and PBS NewsHour as well.

Australia's podcast homepage includes individual news stories from 7 News, which are in a YouTube playlist called 7 News Just In. But there's also a 7 News Just In audio podcast, too. Well, YouTube's blog post was authored by Tim Katz.

Who's he? Well, he describes himself as VP Partnerships Podcasts. That's the first outing for this job title on LinkedIn. He's Director, Head of Sports and News Partnerships. In news coverage in 2023, he was Director and Global Head of Responsibility. And in 2024, he was Global Director of Responsibility and Leader for the Canada and Latin America region. We don't see any use of this podcasting job title until this announcement.

Katz is interviewed as Vice President for Partnerships in Bloomberg. The YouTube podcast trend existed, but it was a matter of us pouring some gas on it, he said. Some parts of the industry give notes of caution. Transistor's Justin Jackson believes in a personal blog post that the podcast industry is fundamentally misdiagnosing YouTube's role in consumers' lives and overestimating the benefits it'll get from the platform.

And Wondery's founder, Hernán Lopez, suggests to keep in mind the bigger picture. Of note, he says, YouTube cited 400 million monthly hours of podcast watching on TV sets, but that's against 30 billion hours of overall YouTube time spent on TV sets. In other news, an exclusive for you, Ira Glass is to be honoured

as this year's recipient of the Governor's Award at the Ambies from the Podcast Academy. The award will be given at the Ambies in Chicago on March the 31st in a ceremony hosted by Tig Notaro. Triton Digital has announced new features for its enterprise podcast host, Omny Studio. Feed Drops is a new feature to allow cross-promotion between shows, and there's now a multi-step scheduler offering more options when new episodes are released to different people.

The UK's Crowd Network is celebrating a new partnership with beer brewer BrewDog. The sponsorship shows the power of an interconnected podcast network with different shows and different hosts trying different beers. And a free radio and podcast festival, Dire Fare Ascoltare, is taking place in Ascoli Piceno in Italy on April the 5th to the 6th. And in podcast news, Brit winner Sam Fender has called the music industry rigged against musicians who, quote, can't afford to tour.

On a new episode of 101 Part-Time Jobs, West London songwriter Matilda Mann confirms she will lose £10,000 personally even if she sells out her upcoming UK tour. Alan McLeod's Walking About has joined the Maximum Fun Network in each episode of Walking About. Alan is joined by a guest in conversations that marry humour with very light cardio and features some of the hidden gems of Los Angeles and beyond.

Realm's film podcast, Unspooled, has a new look which will appear later today, as will its eagerly anticipated episode, all about this year's Oscars ceremony. In our beloved medium this week, real radio history unfolds against a fictional fight for survival as the world's last radio station battles extinction in the streaming age. You can support the fictional fight of WFYZ as it broadcasts important stories about radio from World War II to MTV and beyond.

It's a docu-fiction podcast by Stuart Barefoot and Matt Medeiros. Californian Governor Gavin Newsom is going solo and diving into the real issues that matter in a new show from iHeart called This is Gavin Newsom. It'll cover government, politics, affordability, quality of life and the cultural moments shaping our world. We're promised no spin, no scripts, just real talk about what impacts listeners most. Drink?

A new podcast from San Francisco's KQED launches this week, Close All Tabs, hosted by tech journalist Morgan Sung, which explores how the ever-evolving tech industry is more intertwined with our daily lives than we think. And from Morning Brew, Bossy returns for a brand new season today. In the season premiere, Tara, the founder and CEO of Apps Without Code, sits down with fashion icon Rebecca Minkoff for a can't-miss conversation about how Minkoff built her business empire.

This podcast is sponsored by Riverside. Create studio quality recordings, edit in seconds and repurpose effortlessly, all with Riverside's latest updates. Trusted by top podcasters and brands like Tim Ferriss, Ali Abdal and Spotify, it's their go-to creation platform. You can try Riverside today and grow your podcast. There's a link to do that in the show notes. And that's the latest from our newsletter. To read all the stories and subscribe for free, we're at podnews.net.