Most Podcast Fans Watch and Listen. Very Few Only Watch
By Mark Santos
Mark Studios
Founder
Talk hosts keep hearing that podcasting has turned into a video business: put cameras in the studio or get left behind. The newest audience numbers say something more useful. The people who consume podcasts every week now do both, and the shows they follow have to work with the screen on and with the screen off.
Video and audio run level. In the first quarter of 2026, 78% of U.S. weekly podcast consumers watched podcasts with video and 80% listened to audio-only podcasts, according to Edison Research’s The Podcast Consumer 2026. Those are mostly the same people, not two camps. In Edison’s Q3 2025 reading, video had come out ahead for the first time, 82% to 78%. By Q1 2026, audio was back in front by two points.
Almost nobody only watches. In Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights’ Podcast Download, Spring 2026, only 8% of weekly podcast consumers said they only watch podcasts, while 92% said they listen. The screen does matter more than it used to: 49% now prefer to actively watch when video is available, up from 30% in April 2022. But 30% prefer to have the video playing in the background while they listen. For a lot of the audience, the picture is company, and the audio still carries the show.
YouTube is where they go. YouTube is the platform weekly podcast consumers use most. Edison’s Q1 2026 data puts it at 37%, and the Cumulus and Signal Hill survey at 44%, against 21% and 14% for Spotify. YouTube says more than 1 billion people a month watch podcasts there. More of that viewing is happening on the living room set: viewers watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on YouTube’s living-room devices in October 2025, up from 400 million a year earlier, according to YouTube. Those are the company’s own figures.
The biggest shows publish one episode twice. We took Apple’s top 100 U.S. podcasts, from the chart of October 30, 2026, and checked each show’s latest episodes against YouTube. Seventy-four of the 100 post full episodes there. The video goes up a median of 1.1 hours from the audio release, and 67 of those 74 shows post both within a day. Only one show in the top 100 posted clips without full episodes.
Two details stood out. For 14 of the 74 shows, most episodes carried a different title on YouTube than in the podcast feed: a numbered feed title such as “1074. Andy & DJ CTI” turned into a question or a hook. And 30 of the 100 feeds had no YouTube link anywhere in the show or episode notes, so a listener in a podcast app gets no pointer to the video version.
What that means for a talk show
Make it work blind. With 92% saying they listen, assume much of your audience hears the episode without watching it. If a segment depends on something on screen, describe it out loud, the way radio always has.
Post the full episode, not only clips. Among the top 100, full episodes were the norm, and clips alone were the rare exception.
Ship both versions the same day. Most of the top shows put audio and video up within a day of each other, a median of 1.1 hours apart. A video that lands a week later is a rerun to the people who already heard it.
Title for each place. The feed title serves people who already know the show. The YouTube title has to make a stranger click.
Point listeners to the video. Put the channel link in the show notes of every episode. Almost a third of the top 100 feeds have no YouTube link at all.
What these numbers don’t show
The surveys measure different people. Edison Podcast Metrics interviews about 20,000 U.S. weekly podcast consumers age 13 and older a year; the Cumulus and Signal Hill April 2026 wave asked 600. That is why YouTube’s share comes out at 37% in one and 44% in the other, so quote each figure with its source. YouTube’s audience numbers are its own and aren’t independently audited. Our check covers the 100 biggest shows, not the long tail: the Podcast Index listed 4,725,818 podcast feeds on September 16, 2026, and only about 10% had published an episode in the previous 90 days. Even the money is counted the old way. IAB and PwC put U.S. podcast ad revenue at $2.86 billion in 2025, up 17.6%, under an audio-based definition that may miss ad money from video podcasts on video platforms. And none of this measures a station’s own audience. Your P1s may not behave like the weekly podcast audience at large, and your own downloads and YouTube analytics are the test that counts.
Disclosure: I run a video studio that edits podcast video, among other work.
Mark Santos is the founder of Mark Studios, a video studio in Palm Beach County, Florida, that edits video podcasts and YouTube video for shows and businesses across the U.S. He has edited video since he was 10, and Mark Studios has completed more than 8,000 orders for 4,500+ clients. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
announced during a special dinner at the Edison Ballroom in New York City on October 20. While four spoken-word-formatted stations made the cut in the Legendary Station category, it’s interesting to note that just one talk host – news/talk or sports talk – is a finalist across five personality categories. That distinction goes to WCHS-AM, Charleston, West Virginia morning drive host Chris Lawrence who is a finalist in the Small Market Personality of the Year category. Go get, ‘em Chris! We’re pulling for you.
Talk show hosts are not motivated or driven like disk jockeys or salespeople. Most general managers have never managed talk show hosts. Few program directors have managed talk show hosts. My career has been blessed with daily exchanges with the best talk show hosts in history. Here are some suggestions I would like to share on how to have a superior relationship with talk stars.
We’ve seen autopsies depicted on various cop shows. As the doctor dispassionately probes the deceased, he or she is dictating into an audio recorder: “I’m opening up the chest cavity…”
Whenever possible, USA consumers will pay cash, and they’re paying-down credit card balances, per recently released 