YouTube Now Has 1 Billion Monthly Podcast Listeners

YouTube is celebrating a new milestone today with more than 1 billion active viewers of podcast content on the platform every month. YouTube is also now the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the US according to recent data from Edison Research.

“This milestone underscores how YouTube has come to play an essential role in podcasting for creators and audiences, and how our investments to improve the podcast experience on YouTube are paying off,” said Tim Katz, Vice President, Partnership, Podcasts. “We’ve also added more and more podcasters into our revenue sharing program, the YouTube Partner Program,” the exec added.

YouTube is a natural destination for creators of video podcasts, whether that’s long-form interviews or more casual conversations such as Paul and Brad’s First Ring Daily podcast. It also helps that YouTube is ubiquitous, preinstalled on all smart TVs, and “often the first place people go when looking for a new podcast,” according to Katz. Last year, YouTube users watched over 400 million hours of podcasts every month on living room devices.

While today’s announcement didn’t explicitly mention it, YouTube Music is now Google’s best app for listening to podcasts from YouTube. YouTube Music has an automatic playlist for new podcast episodes, and it’s also possible to add podcasts that aren’t on YouTube using their RSS feeds. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks as my main podcast app in place of Spotify, and it’s a pretty solid replacement for the now-deprecated Google Podcasts app.