Podcasts raked in $9.2B last year, with video content “changing the picture.” But what makes a podcast a podcast?

A new report on podcasts found that video shows are “changing the picture” for the entire industry, following a year where global revenue surged to $9.2 billion.

Management consulting firm Owl & Co.‘s 2025 Global Podcast Economy Report pulled together 300,000 data points from 1,600+ publishers; the firm also personally spoke to ~100 of those publishers to get a bead on what they’re experiencing.

“The same pattern kept surfacing: publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest,” Hernan Lopez, Owl & Co.’s founder (and also the founder of Wondery), said in a newsletter about the report.

The report chronicled an impressive jump in global podcast revenue, from $7.5 billion in 2024 to the aforementioned $9.2 billion in 2025. Direct advertising still drives the lion’s share of that revenue ($5.3 billion, up 28% YoY), followed by consumer purchases ($2.2B, up 22% YoY).

Programmatic advertising, meanwhile, “remained stable,” Owl & Co. found, and was “driven by AdSense.” Programmatic accounted for $1.3B of revenue in 2024 and $1.4B in 2025.

In 2025, $6B of the global $9.2B earned came from the United States. Owl & Co. estimated that the U.S.’s total podcast revenue for 2025 accounted for a full 2% of all U.S. digital ad earnings.

And video podcasts alone accounted for $2.3B of the U.S.’s podcast earnings in 2025. That’s 41%, up from 28% in 2024.

Which brings us back to a central question Owl & Co. poses in this report: What counts as a podcast? YouTube and Spotify have spent years battling to lock down video podcast creators; they’ve signed hosts and networks for exclusive deals, have ramped up tools for podcast creation, distribution, and monetization, and have talked up their podcast traffic.

But at what point does a “video podcast” just become…a video? Are these shows different from regular YouTube uploads because everyone’s sitting around in the same room with a mic? Is there some definitive element that makes an episode of Rotten Mango, for example, different from Dr Insanity‘s true crime deep dives?

For this report, Owl & Co. figured it would follow in YouTube’s footsteps. The platform launched its first podcast charts last year

, and some of the content that popped up there surprised us. Had those been podcasts all along? Lopez said YouTube decided not to judge podcasts based on internal judgment; instead, it deemed shows podcasts if the creators said they were podcasts.

“[I]f a creator calls it a podcast, who are we to argue?” Lopez said. The report added that Owl & Co. considers self-publishing “a key distinction between TV and video podcasts,” and that podcasts “often, but not always” have an RSS feed.

Ultimately, Owl & Co.’s viewpoint is that “an expansive, flexible definition [of “podcast”] is more sustainable than a restrictive one.”

“What it means to be a podcast is changing,” it said, “and that has implications for creation, monetization, and discovery.”

Those implications can be seen in Owl & Co.’s breakdown of podcasting’s 27% YoY leap in revenue from 2024 to 2025. Of the companies it spoke to, 74% reported growth in their podcast business. 37% said their podcast businesses were “significantly better” in 2025 vs 2024.

Why were they better? Companies reported reasons like:

• “Podcasts increasingly bought alongside radio/audio”
• “This [video-to-audio] transformation is redefining podcast companies as full-scale media producers, closer to TV networks than traditional audio publishers”
• “Industry maturity, additional inventory”
• and “Growing demand from platforms for audiovisual content and higher metrics”

While direct ads grew and programmatic ads stayed the same, another major revenue driver remained dependable: community subscriptions. Owl & Co. found that Patreon “accounts for more consumer revenue than any other company,” and that listeners who subscribe to their favorite shows through Patreon (and other platforms like Supercast and Substack) “think of themselves as supporters, not just subscribers.”

Owl & Co.’s forward look from this report advises podcast publishers to lean more on money from supporters instead of relying on platform earnings. It noted that it’s seen “YouTube CPMs and sell-through rates fluctuate (and are generally lower outside key markets).”

“The $9.2B podcasting market is still maturing,” it concluded. “As the industry evolves, new entrants can win and incumbents can reinvent themselves. Those who succeed will determine the definition of podcasting.”