Tu-Dum

0:00This is Gavin Gattis in for Tom Webster on today Wednesday, September 23, 2026, to end up. Podcasting was built without gatekeepers, so what does it mean when the third biggest place people find podcasts is gated? As usual, the following is in first person from Tom, so here we go. Last week at Podcast Movement in New York, I gave a keynote built around a phrase we all say without thinking, wherever you get your podcasts. I gave a keynote built around that same phrase five years ago at Podcast Movement in Nashville when we had new research showing that YouTube was increasingly where people were consuming podcasts that went about as how you'd expect. Some of the room thought I was flat out wrong because they didn't see it in their downloads.

1:02Some thought I was crazy, which is demonstrably true, but not germane to the discussion. And some believed it and rebuilt their businesses around it. A few of our partners still point to that afternoon as the moment they did. The point I was making in 2021 was that if you're going to say wherever you get your podcasts, you better actually be there, and a lot of shows weren't. I still don't think every podcast has to be on YouTube or has to be video at all, but you are working with one hand tied behind your back if you don't have some kind of YouTube strategy, even if the content itself never goes there. I think 2026 is another one of those moments and it comes from a question we've asked in all four years of the podcast landscape, our flagship study of podcast consumption in America. The question is simple, where are all the places you've consumed a podcast in the past 12 months? You can check as many as you like. It has nothing to do with downloads or how much you consume or which one you use most. It's just the surfaces where you encounter

2:05podcasts. The top two or what they have been for several years now, YouTube is first by a lot. Spotify is a distance second. Number three is not Apple podcasts. It's Netflix. Some of you will struggle with that the way some of you struggle with YouTube and Nashville. So remember that this question is a low bar. It only asks whether you've consumed a podcast there at some point in the past year. Netflix is enormous while they have stopped reporting this. The last figure they released was 89.63 million paid members for the US and Canada combined at the end of 2024. And the podcast on there are hits, make no mistake. Netflix is showcasing some of the best of what we make, not peddling junk. So a fifth of the podcast consumers encountering one there is entirely plausible. It's the fact that it's third that should give us pause. I was not troubled when the YouTube numbers first dropped and I have never been troubled by them since because YouTube has been a tremendous boom

3:09to this industry. YouTube gives you all the opportunity you could possibly want. Earlier this month, the media analyst Evan Shapiro with Shirla Zara and Whaler listed published a list called the affinity 100 100 creators with the most impact right now ranked on what audiences actually do with their work rather than on follower counts. Almost none of them were celebrities before they were creators and you may not recognize most of the names because you aren't in the pockets of audiences where these people are enormously influential. These pockets are not small and it was YouTube and TikTok that let people who were never movie stars make their fortunes. YouTube has changed some of the economics of podcasting but in exchange it gave us free hosting and the best discovery engine we have. It remains the top source of podcast discovery in the landscape. So YouTube does not trouble me. Netflix troubles me. I said as much in the room at podcast movement and I'm going to say it to you now for three reasons. The first is that your podcast is not on Netflix and it can't be.

4:15We like to call spotifying YouTube walled gardens but they aren't really. You can put your show on YouTube or on Spotify promote it there and as long as you don't violate terms of service, you stay there. You cannot put your show on Netflix. The podcast that are on Netflix are frankly the shows that don't need the help. They were already the upper echelon by audience which is precisely why Netflix picked them. If you're in podcasting sizeable middle class, not large enough to be at the very top but large enough to make a living, you can't possibly get on Netflix. That makes it the great gay keeper of this business and as I recall from when I got involved in podcasting back in 2005, one of the whole points of the thing is that there were no gay keepers. I'm not sure why we are feeding our content to one of the biggest gay keepers in media. The second reason is mind hunter. A lot of people watched it and a lot of people were furious when it did not get a third season canceled for reasons that never satisfied anyone who loved it.

5:17Netflix will cancel things based on whether you finished episodes or on the velocity of viewing or on whether the season got watched inside of a given window and none of that is a judgment about the show. I was more distressed when they canceled BOA which was radically original, well acted and ended after two seasons on infuriating cliffhanger. This rolls back up to the gatekeeper problem. If you can't get your content on there, that's one thing. But if you can get it on there and can simply be canceled and I don't mean turns of service canceled, I mean not popular enough canceled, the Netflix is being the ultimate gatekeeper in a way that runs against everything the medium stands for. The third reason concerns me the most. Look at the top three platforms where people say they've ever consumed podcasts and remember that this is about where they encounter podcasts, not how much they consume. None of the three is an app or service that showcases podcasts. When you log into YouTube, you can't get to podcasts but they are not what you are presented with

6:21and the data supports that. When we asked people how they discovered a podcast on YouTube, the top answer is that they search for a specific show or topic followed by searching for a specific host or celebrity and together those roll up to 77% of YouTube discoverers attributing the discovery to intentional search. That's not serendipity and it's not algorithmic discovery. I'm not knocking YouTube here. It contains podcasts but it was not built for them. The same is true Spotify which I also think has been a boon to this industry because it keeps audio fresh but it is primarily a music app and podcasts are not what it puts in the window and I don't even need to make the point about Netflix when you log into Netflix what you see are the originals Netflix has shelled out for those not your show ever and not even the top podcast. The three biggest sources for encountering podcasts in the United States are not places that showcase podcasts. The great danger in this is that we are losing our tower records. I don't mean tower as a place

7:26that kept physical media live. I mean it as a place that existed solely to showcase the culture that existed to solely to showcase what we do. When we lost tower physical media lost a lot and the charts you see now on a service like Spotify have a different character. They are over-weighted with the very top artist and dramatically underweighted with the middle class. The number 30 album the artist who used to live in the top 40 with one hit or a few music sales now look like a music section at Walmart a place that does not focus on music where the physical media music section is either a single display for Taylor Swift or a rack of maybe 30 to 50 CDs that don't make sense as a top 40 of anything just classics and hits from the past plus whoever is the biggest right now. There is no back catalog and nothing that says music matters here. It's one kiosk away from the iPhone cases. When we don't have outlets that showcase what we do what we do becomes less visible and the landscape has a number for that too. Last year 19% of podcast

8:30consumers named the podcast specific app everything from Apple podcast to podcast to overcast as the app where they most consume podcasts. This year that 19% is 15%. To me that is every bit is concerning as Netflix in third place. When we lose our showcase the place where we get to sing the song of podcasting it isn't only the long tail that suffers it's anybody outside of the top 500 or 1000 shows no more serendipity. If the places where podcasts are encountered surface them only through deliberate search or through a handpick selection that a gatekeeper has judged relevant to its other programming then we risk podcasting as a medium declining the way physical media has that will show up in smaller and mid-tier shows first but also in whole genres because YouTube and Netflix are not built around audio and are not going to recommend you an audio podcast. The genres that are most audio forward and often too expensive to produce this video are scripted

9:32shows documentaries drama audio fiction entire genres could be forgotten because they don't fit what Netflix is looking for in a podcast and what is Netflix looking for in a podcast. Think about what one looks like there it's Pete Davidson talking to somebody across a couple of mics and that is a hell of a lot cheaper to make than the third season of the OA I would rather have it's cheap programming cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy than another season of a show sitting on the algorithmic edge of worth it. Editor note from Gavin here the following sentence is in bold because it should be I worry that the continued rise of Netflix and podcasting turns podcasting for much of America into T-Moo TV. I want to be careful here because there is a version of this argument that is just an old man yelling at a streaming service I also live in this market Netflix is not doing anything to us it is a customer and for the shows that get the call

10:34a lucrative one 21% of podcast consumers touched a podcast there in the past year and 5% call it their main platform so nobody listening is being rerouted yet and the audience never cared about our gatekeepers the promise of no gatekeepers was a promise we made to creators listeners only ever signed up for good shows wherever they happen to be and a fifth of them found one on Netflix and presumably had a nice time so the answer is not to boycott Netflix and nobody asked me anyway the answer is to make sure the places that do showcase podcasts don't quietly disappear while the biggest shows chase the biggest check because those places are where the next affinity 100 gets found which is why this is the first step and not the last we are the trade association for this industry with nearly 250 partners at this point and we are going to have conversations with them about this all of them because I think the industry needs to be careful about deals that

11:34are lucrative in the moment and for the medium might be shooting ourselves in the foot I don't want to be T-Moo TV I want every genre and topic and podcasting to keep having equal access to an audience and not to be subject to the whim of a gatekeeper we are potentially making a deal with the devil when we put our programming on Netflix because ultimately we don't matter to Netflix and I'd like to focus on the places where we do wherever you get your podcast now includes a place no one can get your podcast to dumb thank you to the wonderful sponsors of the podcast landscape 2026 including American public media better help NPR ESPN podcasts series six and media and DAX as well as our research partners at signal hill insights the podcast landscape 2026 comprises a sample of 5473 us adults aged 18 and older waited to the us census to represent the United States population thanks for listening to Tom's article to dumb for sounds profitable I'm

12:41Gavin Gattis and we'll see you next week with another narrated article