By Hernan Lopez.
Companies mentioned: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Comcast, Disney, Fox, Meta, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Spotify.
Questions answered: How big is the global podcast economy in 2025, and how fast is it growing? Which monetization shift separated the fastest-growing podcast publishers from the rest? What does the podcast industry’s 92x decade say about where vertical is today?
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The Global Podcast Economy generated $9.2B in revenue in 2025, up 23% from the year before, according to Owl & Co’s Global Podcast Economy Report released today and covered by Bloomberg. Video is changing the picture. We built the report from over 300,000 data points across 1,600+ publishers, and spoke with more than 100 podcast publishers and experts around the world. The same pattern kept surfacing: publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest. (We didn’t get into the cost side, however: as we have covered extensively since last year, getting video ‘right’ can be expensive, and the bar keeps rising).
Which raises the definitional question again: what is a podcast?