Owl & Co: Global Podcast Economy Grew 23% To $9.2 Billion In 2025.

The global podcast economy generated $9.2 billion in revenue last year, up 23% from 2024, as video increasingly becomes a revenue driver rather than just a discovery tool, according to a new report from Hernan Lopez’s Owl & Co. “Video is changing the picture,” he says in the latest Streamonomics newsletter.

Owl & Co’s Global Podcast Economy Report is based on more than 300,000 data points across more than 1,600 publishers, along with conversations with more than 100 podcast publishers and experts around the world. The report tracks five revenue streams — direct advertising, programmatic advertising, consumer revenue, branded/work-for-hire revenue and other revenue — across 81 markets.

“The same pattern kept surfacing,” Lopez writes. “Publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest.”

The report says direct advertising remains podcasting’s largest revenue source, growing to $5.3 billion in 2025 last year worldwide. That was from $4.2 billion in 2024. Consumer revenue was the second-largest bucket, rising from $1.8 billion to $2.2 billion led by Patreon subscriptions, while programmatic revenue remained stable at $1.4 billion. Branded podcast revenue declined from $300 million to $200 million.

“Biggest gainers included companies and markets that ramped up video as a monetization tool in addition to discovery,” the report says. “Pure audio-centric podcasts grew slowly or lost ground.” Among the companies surveyed, three in four (74%) reported revenue was better in 2025 vs. 2024.

The U.S. remains the largest podcast market, with $6 billion in revenue, up 27% year-over-year. “Direct advertising is still the leading revenue source,” the report says, while video is now a significant tailwind. Owl & Co estimates U.S. video podcast revenue at $2.3 billion in 2025, while video now drives 41% of net podcast advertising revenue in the U.S., up from 28% in 2024.

Beyond the U.S., Owl & Co says the biggest podcast markets are China, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Canada.

The findings also show how quickly the definition of podcasting is changing. Lopez says Owl & Co last year used the definition of “a show centered around the human voice designed to be consumed on demand,” but that no longer fully captures the market as podcasts move across audio, video, live and on-demand formats.

“That’s already outdated,” Lopez writes. He points to live-streamed shows like “TBPN” that then become a podcast as how the model is shifting. “We landed on the principle that YouTube introduced last year, when they first disclosed reaching one billion podcast consumers a month — if the creator calls it a podcast, who are we to argue?” Lopez writes.

The report also shows how far podcasting has come in a decade. Lopez says when he started Wondery in 2016, estimates put the podcast industry at about $100 million annually. At $9.2 billion today, he says the business has grown 92-fold.

“The ‘wait until it’s proven’ narrative reminds me of the conversation about podcasts in 2016,” Lopez says.

Still, the video shift is not without challenges. Lopez cautions that Owl & Co did not analyze costs in the report and says producing video at a competitive level can be expensive. “As we have covered extensively since last year, getting video ‘right’ can be expensive, and the bar keeps rising,” he says.