The news: As the number of podcast listeners grow, giving them options for both listening to or watching the latest episodes has become key to maintaining audiences.

• More than half of US podcast consumers (53%) prefer watching podcasts over just listening on YouTube, per the Podcast Landscape 2025 report from Sounds Profitable and Signal Hill.
• Spotify’s video play is paying off—3 in 10 podcast consumers on the platform watch rather than listen to more than half of their podcasts.

That flexibility is ideal for advertisers, especially considering 88% of podcast listeners have taken action because of a podcast ad, per Acast and Dentsu, and 59% were led to think more favorably of a brand.

Podcasts by the numbers:

• Time spent grows: Weekly listeners consume 6.3 hours of podcasts, a 20-minute increase from 2024, per Podcast Landscape 2025. And 44% spend more time listening to podcasts now than they did a year ago.
• Focus is limited: More than half (53%) of respondents listen to just two or three podcasts regularly while 21% listen to five or more.
• Access points matter: 34% consume podcasts on Apple iPhones, yet only 11% listen via Apple Podcasts/iTunes. A quarter (25%) prefer Android smartphones.
• Audiences skew younger: Only 28% of listeners are 55 and older, and 61% of that demographic has never listened to a podcast.

Video killed the radio star: Among podcast audiences that use a smart TV to consume podcasts, 76% prefer YouTube. “YouTube is a very good podcast app, and I think that’s increasingly how many people want to find and consume their podcast,” said Tom Webster, partner at Sounds Profitable.

YouTube also holds steady as the dominant home of podcasts—40% of US listeners prefer the streaming service, a 1 percentage point increase from 2024. Meanwhile, Spotify dropped 2 percentage points from 2024 to 18%.

Our take: YouTube’s connected TV (CTV) and podcast dominance presents a unique opportunity for brands to advertise in a variety of formats, whether that’s sponsored episodes, partnerships, digital video ads, or pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll audio spots.

With listening time growing and audio platforms building out their video feeds, it’s never been easier to reach audiences where they are.