YouTube Still Rules the Podcast Platform Race

YouTube is still the podcast platform of choice for America. New Q3 2026 data from Edison Research's Podcast Metrics study once again ranks YouTube as the most-used podcast platform among U.S. weekly podcast consumers, as reported by Barrett Media. Spotify held onto second place with 17 percent of listeners naming it their most-used source, Apple Podcasts landed third with 9 percent, and Netflix — a streaming service that does not even run a dedicated podcast platform — debuted in seventh place with 3 percent.

The gap between first and second has widened since Edison's October 2024 reading, when YouTube sat at 31 percent against Spotify's 27 percent and Apple's 15 percent, according to Barrett Media — a crossover that major outlets such as The Wrap flagged at the time. A separate Edison reading published in June put YouTube's share of the most-used podcast platform crown at 37 percent, according to Radio Ink, roughly double Spotify's position at the time.

Whatever the exact share in a given quarter, the direction is consistent: video-first destinations keep gaining while audio-only apps keep defending. The same crossover is now happening abroad. In the United Kingdom, YouTube overtook Spotify 29 percent to 28 percent in Q1 2026 fieldwork, the first time it led there on record, according to PPC Land — nearly two years after the same flip happened in the United States.

Netflix is crashing the podcast platform party

The most surprising line in the new data is Netflix's. Three percent of weekly podcast consumers now name the streaming giant as the podcast platform they use most, landing it seventh overall. That is a remarkable foothold for a company whose podcast strategy was barely a rumor a year ago. Netflix has since moved aggressively into the space, including a reported deal for Barstool Sports shows that would pull sports programming off YouTube, as reported in GenZ NewZ's earlier coverage of the Netflix Barstool talks. For a subscription streaming service to rank at all on a most-used podcast platform list shows how quickly the definition of a podcast has stretched beyond audio apps, a shift also explored in this newsroom's reporting on Netflix's podcast surge. Browse the full beat at the podcasts topic page.

Video won the platform, not the format

Here is the twist: people have not stopped listening. Research from SiriusXM Media and Edison Research found that 90 percent of monthly podcast consumers listened to an audio-first podcast in the past month — nearly identical to the 89 percent who consumed a video podcast, according to Podcast News Daily. Seventy percent did both, while only 10 percent exclusively listened and 20 percent exclusively watched. Edison vice president Megan Lazovick summed it up during a webinar: "People don't identify as an audio podcast person or a video podcast person." They simply follow the shows they like, picking the format that fits the moment.

Context matters more than the label. The same research found that 72 percent of monthly podcast consumers played a video podcast in the background or minimized the video in the past month, according to Podcast News Daily, meaning consumption logged as video was effectively an audio experience. Audio wins the car — 68 percent of consumers choose it there — plus workouts and time on the go. Video wins discovery: it puts a face on the host, feeds recommendation algorithms, and travels across social clips. The podcast platform hierarchy is really a story about where people find shows, not just how they hear them.

What it means for listeners

For listeners, the practical effect is a richer but busier menu. Shows that once lived only in a podcast app now premiere as studio videos, get clipped for feeds, and land on living-room TVs. Thirteen percent of U.S. weekly podcast consumers now say they most often use a TV to consume podcasts, a twelvefold increase over five years, according to earlier Edison data reported in this newsroom's coverage of the YouTube podcast deal race. Creators, in turn, film nearly everything — and the platforms reward them for it. YouTube's recommendation engine and ad business give video shows a discovery surface that audio apps still cannot match, which is why new shows increasingly launch video-first. Listeners get something from the bargain too: one free app now covers the commute, the workout, and the living-room screen, even as traditional podcast apps fight to keep the commute for themselves.

None of this means audio is dying. Total U.S. weekly podcast listening time climbed 386 percent over the past decade to 812 million hours a week, according to Edison's Share of Ear research, as reported by Radio Online. The medium kept growing year over year, adding 39 million hours compared with 2025. Edison's Infinite Dial study released this year found monthly podcast consumption at an all-time high of 58 percent of Americans age 12 and older — about 167 million people — with 45 percent, roughly 130 million, tuning in weekly.

The counterpoint to the video-everything narrative is simple: the audience got bigger in every direction at once. The podcast platform crown may sit with YouTube, but the real winner is the habit itself.