YouTube Is Still the Podcast King; Spotify Slides, Apple Fades, Netflix Sneaks Into the Top 10

LOS ANGELES FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026

Another quarter, another Edison report, another reminder that the podcast platform war is not a war anymore. Edison Research’s Q3 2026 Podcast Metrics, released from its SSRS panel on Thursday, once again rank YouTube as the most-used source for podcasts among U.S. weekly podcast consumers. Not Spotify, which spent billions trying to own this category. Not Apple, which literally invented it. YouTube — the video site where people go to watch a guy unbox sneakers and somehow end up three hours deep into a true-crime series.

Spotify took second place at 17% of weekly podcast consumers naming it their most-used source. Apple Podcasts was third at 9%. Both of those numbers would have been unthinkable as recently as a couple of years ago — and the trend line is moving the wrong way for both of them.

02 The Gap Keeps Getting Bigger

For context, here is what Edison’s October 2024 U.S. reading looked like: YouTube at 31%, Spotify at 27%, Apple Podcasts at 15%. It was a race then. It is not a race now. Spotify has fallen from 27% to 17% — nearly ten points gone in two years — while Apple has dropped from 15% to 9%. YouTube, meanwhile, just sits at the top of the table and grows.

A separate June 2026 reading put YouTube’s most-used share at 37%, roughly double Spotify at the time. And it is not just an American story: in the UK, YouTube overtook Spotify 29% to 28% in Q1 2026 fieldwork — the first time YouTube led there on record. The same movie is playing in two markets, and the ending is the same.

This did not happen because YouTube built a great podcast app. It happened because YouTube never needed to. The audience was already there — billions of people with the app open all day, an algorithm that treats a two-hour conversation exactly like any other video, and a phone screen that is now the default podcast player for a generation that grew up watching instead of listening. Edison Research wrote in the report: “Podcast content on YouTube has dramatically changed the entire ecosystem and continues to gain ground as a destination for podcast consumption.”

03 Video Already Won the Format War

The platform rankings are really just the scoreboard. The deeper story is in Edison’s earlier “Podcast Consumer 2026” study, which found podcasting itself has never been bigger: 58% of Americans age 12 and up consume a podcast monthly — 167 million people, an all-time high — and 45% do it weekly, or about 130 million people. The audience is enormous. It just doesn’t experience podcasts the way the word “podcast” implies anymore.

Among Americans who have ever consumed a podcast, 57% report both listening and watching. Only 21% consume via audio exclusively. And just 2% watch exclusively. Let that sink in: for every person who treats a podcast as a pure audio experience, there are nearly three who bounce between the audio and the video. The “pod” in podcast died a long time ago; this is a video format that happens to also work with the screen off.

Two-thirds of weekly podcast consumers listen most often at home, which tells you exactly what’s happening — people are putting podcasts on the TV, the laptop, the tablet on the kitchen counter. They are not hunched over a phone with earbuds in at the gym. They are watching. And when people watch, YouTube is where they watch.

That is why the format war ended before most of the industry admitted it started. Spotify built its podcast empire on the idea that audio was the medium and the app was the destination. YouTube never argued. It just let every creator upload the video version, let the algorithm do distribution, and let the audience sort it out. The audience sorted it out — and you can see the video era playing out show by show on the Podcasts hub.

04 What It Means for Spotify’s Audio Empire

Timing is everything, and the timing here is brutal. Days before these numbers landed, Spotify re-signed Joe Rogan to a new multiyear deal — reportedly around $250 million — locking down the single biggest name in podcasting for the next era. It is a monster deal. It is also, read against the Edison numbers, a defensive one.

Think about what Spotify is actually buying. Rogan’s audience has always been a YouTube audience first — clips, full episodes, the whole ecosystem lives there, and Spotify has known it for years, which is why it loosened the exclusivity in the first place. Paying a quarter of a billion dollars to keep the king of podcasts is not a flex about growth. It is about not losing the one asset that keeps 17% from becoming 12%.

The honest question for Spotify is what the next five years of its podcast business even look like. It spent the audio-only years acquiring studios, signing exclusives, and building a walled garden — and the audience walked out through a hole in the fence that was always open. Video-first is no longer a strategy; it is the table stakes. Every new show that launches audio-only, like the two that just came out of Drew Spears Productions’ new network, is launching with one hand tied behind its back unless the camera is already rolling.

05 Apple’s Slow Fade

Apple Podcasts at 9% deserves its own moment of silence. This is the company that created podcasting — the word is literally a mashup of iPod and broadcast — and it is now a single-digit player in the category it invented. Apple spent two decades treating podcasts as a checkbox feature inside a music app while YouTube treated them as content, and the market has rendered its verdict.

The irony is that Apple clearly sees it. The company has been hiring the team behind the Huxe AI podcast startup and licensing its tech, a move that reads like an admission that the old playbook — directories, RSS, benign neglect — is not going to recover 15%, let alone 30%. Whether AI-powered discovery can drag Apple back into relevance is an open question. The Edison numbers suggest the hole is getting deeper faster than the ladder is getting longer.

06 Netflix Walks In Without Trying

And then there is the strangest line in the whole report: Netflix debuted in seventh place, with 3% of U.S. weekly podcast consumers naming it their most-used podcast platform. Read that again. Netflix. Seventh. Three percent. A company with no podcast app, no podcast directory, no podcast strategy, no RSS anything — ranking ahead of actual podcast companies that have spent actual years on this.

How? Because video podcasts are just… videos. Long-form conversations, talk shows, comedy panels, true crime — the stuff Netflix already commissions, already licenses, already surfaces to 300 million households. When the audience can’t tell the difference between a “podcast” and a “talk show on a streaming service,” the distinction stops mattering. Netflix didn’t enter podcasting. Podcasting expanded until it included Netflix.

That is the part that should worry everyone else. If a company can take 3% of the market without trying, imagine what happens when it decides to try — a podcast tab, a video-podcast originals slate, exclusive windows for the biggest shows. The infrastructure is already built. The audience is already trained. The only thing missing is the decision, and decisions like that get made in rooms where somebody just read this Edison report.

Podcast Consumer 2026: 58% of Americans 12+ consume monthly (167M, all-time high); 45% weekly (130M). 57% of ever-consumers both listen and watch; 21% audio-only; 2% watch-only. Two-thirds of weekly consumers listen most often at home (InsideRadio).