Podcasts Are Growing, but That Does Not Necessarily Track for Podcast Apps ⇥ uncommonapps.nyc

Dustin Bluck, developer of Castro:

You might have a theory that there’s a funnel and growth in podcasts *must* ultimately be good for the apps. Like YouTube and TikTok introduce people to the concept of podcasts via shorter videos, and as certain users become more enthusiastic about a particular creator or the whole concept, they migrate to specialty apps to ensure they never miss an episode. I like this theory. It’s a good story, but I see very little evidence of this happening. Instead, the apps are largely fighting to retain the same cohort of users who have been using podcast apps since ~2015 while the world moves on.

I am curious to know if this is true for apps other than Castro. I do not want to overindex on it alone. However, the growth in video podcasting is a limiter for third-party apps.

One of the problems with available stats like those from Buzzsprout and Transistor is that, because they track RSS feeds of podcasts delivered through their platforms, they do not include YouTube subscribers or views. That is missing a huge chunk of an audience: Edison’s 2026 survey (PDF) indicates YouTube usage for podcasts is higher than any other medium. Because video podcasts hosted on YouTube are played through YouTube, they are siloed and there is no third-party app support.

Anil Dash wrote, in 2014, that the simple phrase wherever you get your podcasts is a “radical statement”:

[…] Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

Video podcasting changes that. In its simplest form, it is just a YouTube channel, which means it is siloed and controlled by Google. Spotify also supports video but only in its app. Apple introduced its own take using HLS earlier this year; though it also uses a proprietary format, it is one third-party apps can support. But YouTube is YouTube; it is where people go for video. The walled garden is coming for podcasting.