In the first quarter of 2026, Czech podcasts recorded 88 live podcast events. Podcasts have become cultural events with their own economics.
Who would have said three years ago that people would buy tickets to watch two people chatting into a microphone? Nobody. Yet that is exactly what is happening. České podcasty has started mapping live podcasts, and in the first quarter of 2026 alone it counted 88 podcast performances. Add to that 392 new shows and 32,754 published episodes in just three months. Live podcasts have stopped being a marketing activity. They are cultural events with their own business model.
One microphone, a thousand seats
Globally, live podcasts have become a separate segment of the entertainment industry. SmartLess, with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, went on a sold-out tour across North America and inspired the six-part documentary series SmartLess: On the Road on the streaming platform Max. Three actors, six cities, six sold-out venues and six hours of content that also works afterwards as a stream. The tour showed that a live podcast can be a gateway to other formats.
Conan O’Brien performs live episodes of his podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend in sold-out theatres. His 2026 tour covers dozens of cities from coast to coast, with new material written directly for the stage. London’s O2 Arena hosts live podcast recordings, as do mid-sized theatres in New York. Live recording has become a reliable source of income from tickets, sponsorship and merchandise. And industry analysts describe 2026 as a breakthrough year for this format.
What unites them is an audience willing to pay for something it could listen to for free. A live experience offers interaction, energy and community in one room. “Creators are the new startups.” The currency is attention. And live podcasts turn that currency into a real relationship with the audience, says Tereza Tiller, who leads České podcasty.
Czechia follows the same path
In Czechia, this shift became concrete in the first quarter of 2026. Kecy a Politika are going on tour around towns from Líbeznice to Žďár nad Sázavou. Brain We Are filled Divadlo Na Maninách with a live recording of a podcast about the brain and biohacking. Přepište dějiny made it into the programme of the 14th Theatre Night at Divadlo Na zábradlí, where historians Michal Stehlík and Martin Groman recorded an episode in front of an audience under the theme “Just speak up!”.
The Jeden svět festival included an entire podcast stage at Café Lucerna in its programme. Podcasts are moving into spaces that until recently belonged to theatre or documentary film. These are not one-off special episodes. They are recurring events with their own audience and an admission fee. In the first quarter of 2026, České podcasty counted 88 of them across Czechia. That is on average one live recording a day, in a country of ten million people.
Distribution is not enough, creators need an ecosystem
As the scene grows, so does the need for infrastructure that lets creators actually make a living from their work. Being visible in an app is not enough if there is no path from listening to support. České podcasty has therefore partnered with the platform Forendors. On České podcasty, where there are already more than nine thousand freely available podcasts, creators can simply verify their profile and link it to their page on Forendors. Listeners can access paid content in one click. The creator gains new subscribers through the catalogue, the largest of its kind in Czechia. The listener gets a way to support the content they listen to.
“As the largest Czech podcast catalogue, we are the place people reach from search, where they discover their new favourite podcasts. And when they find one, we want them to support it,” says Tiller. “Working podcasts are not just audio in an app. They are brands, communities and projects that need their own space and their own economics.”
Paying for content is the new normal
Audience interest in direct support for creators is growing globally. In August 2025, Patreon passed $10 billion paid out to creators since its founding, CEO Jack Conte announced. Today more than $2 billion a year flows through the platform, and over 300,000 creators with 25 million paid memberships operate on Patreon. Podcasters on Patreon alone earned over $472 million in 2024 from 6.7 million paid memberships. That is a year-on-year increase of more than a third compared with $350 million in 2023. Audiences pay where a relationship exists.
Forendors’ figures confirm this in Czechia. In 2025 the platform paid creators CZK 85 million, bringing the total to CZK 170 million since it was founded in 2021. The average monthly subscription has risen to CZK 177, and people prepay for content for an average of 396 days. The share of users who support more than one creator has for the first time passed a tenth, reaching 11%. “Paid content has become a common part of supporting creators in Czechia,” says Forendors co-founder Denisa Hrubešová. “We are also seeing an increasing use of a combination of subscription models, from monthly support through one-off unlocks to gift subscriptions. It matters for creators that their income gradually diversifies. And for audiences, that they can choose the form of support that suits them at the moment.”
Podcasts as a business
The US podcast market passed $2 billion in advertising revenue alone last year and in 2025 is heading for $3 billion, according to the IAB. But advertising is only part of the story. Independent podcasters are increasingly profitable when they combine several income sources and operate as small media companies. Live events, subscriptions, merchandise and communities create an ecosystem in which a podcast becomes a full-fledged brand. Creators in smaller European markets are catching up on a smaller scale for now, but the direction is the same. The combination of live events, subscriptions and podcast advertising makes a business that does not depend on a single source of income. As platforms gradually discover the creator economy, the way we look at podcasts is changing too.
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