Podcasts: The New Mass Medium?

Over the past few years, podcasts have emerged as a new form of distributing audio content to a broad, international audience. Particularly popular among younger audiences and digital natives, podcasts are especially well-suited for long-form audio content such as interview formats and talks that dig deeper into certain topics or special interests than radio formats directed at the general public usually can.

According to the Reuters Institute’s latest Digital News Report, 38 percent of survey respondents from 47 countries across the globe had listened to a podcast in the month preceding the survey, with the level of adoption varying significantly across different markets. The following chart shows where some the biggest podcast enthusiasts and skeptics live.

Since 2019, podcast adoption has risen across all markets with Spain, the United States and Sweden home to the most podcast listeners with adoption rates of 44 and 43 percent, respectively. Japan and France are at the other end of the scale, with 26 and 28 percent of Japanese and French respondents having listened to a pod in the past month. While podcast adoption has risen compared to 2019, the Reuters Institute noted in a previous report that the pandemic initially slowed down growth as "Covid-19 disrupted the commute to work", a typical setting for podcast consumption. The rise of podcasts has since resumed, however, bringing it one step closer to becoming a true mass medium.