Recently I saw a tweet from my acquaintance Justin Jackson over at Transistor.fm where he shared a blog post on Transistor written by his daughter (I don’t know her age, but it blows my mind that people I consider peers have kids old enough to write blog posts on company website) about her findings from a survey of her peers (Gen Z) and where they listen to podcasts.
Her takeaway (graph below) is that Gen Z largely listens to podcasts on Spotify (52%) while Millennials are split between Spotify and Apple Podcasts and Gen X prefers Apple Podcasts. There is a relatively strong “Other” for Gen X as well, which presumably means they use a myriad of apps like Overcast or similar.
This was super interesting to me and made me curious if I could replicate the results.
So I decided to conduct a poll on my personal Twitter account, which has over 33,000 followers who are mostly in the tech world and mostly Millennials and Gen X. Depending on how you define Gen Z, I likely have very few Gen Z followers.
So I shared a poll recently that asked where my followers listen to podcasts. I was surprised at the results:
As you can see:
- 42.7% listen on Spotify
- 23.6% listen on Apple Podcasts
- 31.5% listen on “Other” (other apps presumably)
- Just 2.2% listen on YouTube primarily.
My peer Ruben had a similar reaction to mine:
I’ll be curious to run this poll again in a year or so (Siri: remind me to redo this poll in a year), but for now it seems Spotify is the most popular platform for listening to podcasts.
This is backed up by other studies as well. In January 2020 Statista ran a survey and discovered that the most popular platforms are:
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Podcasts
- Pandora (!)
- Website
- Audible
- NPR One
- TuneIn
Here’s their chart:
