According to a new report from Owl & Co., the global podcast economy reached revenue of $9.2 billion in 2025, up 23% year on year. In the US, the largest market, 73% of this growth came from video-related revenue, Ashley Carman of Bloomberg wrote, based on the report. Audio revenue did not fall. Video was added alongside it as a separate monetisation layer, and the companies that structured it this way grew fastest.
What Owl & Co. measured
The report is based on more than 300,000 data points, 1,600 publishers and more than 100 interviews with producers and managers across the market. The author is Hernan Lopez, founder of the consultancy Owl & Co., and previously founder and CEO of the podcast studio Wondery, which Amazon announced it would acquire in December 2020. The earlier Owl & Co. estimate from May 2025 put the global market for 2024 at $7.3 billion, with the US accounting for roughly two-thirds.
Owl & Co. defines the podcast market with a broader metric than IAB. Alongside direct and programmatic advertising, it adds subscriptions (Patreon, Apple+), branded content, platform payment revenue (YouTube Premium, Spotify) and tipping. By comparison, IAB / PwC reported for 2025 US podcast advertising revenue of $2.862 billion, up 17.6% year on year. The gap between the IAB’s $2.862 billion and Owl & Co.’s $9.2 billion shows how much podcast revenue sits outside the classic advertising side.
Why 73% of growth came from video
The 73% figure for the US market comes from Ashley Carman’s Bloomberg article, for which she was given the report to review. Carman also included a contextual quote from Lopez. “Companies grew fastest when they turned video into a monetization and marketing engine, and they did not lose audio revenue at the same time,” Lopez told Bloomberg in an interview. “The more thoughtful and deliberate the companies were about their video strategy, the larger the growth was.”
In the report itself, Lopez puts the same idea more briefly. “Publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest.” The report makes a key distinction between video as discovery (clips on TikTok, vertical video on YouTube, audio show lifts) and video as monetisation (a proprietary video format with ad insertion, YouTube AdSense splits, sponsorship integrations placed directly in the frame). Publishers that used video as a marketing channel for their audio catalogue grew more slowly than those that made video a separate revenue line.
Spotify changes the threshold for video monetisation
For the European market, the most important shift is the one Spotify is making. In January 2026 the company lowered the entry threshold to its Partner Programme from 2,000 listeners over 30 days to 1,000, from 10,000 hours of consumption over 30 days to 2,000, and from 12 published episodes to 3. Spotify also opened its Distribution API to hosting platforms, so from May 2026 creators can monetise video podcasts published via Audioboom, Libsyn and Podigee.
Podigee is a Berlin-based company. This is the first concrete moment when a major US video monetisation channel opens up to European hosts. Spotify records more than 590,000 video podcasts and more than 390 million users who have interacted with the format on the platform. In its Q1 2026 results, filed in a 6-K SEC filing, Spotify reported a year-on-year decline of 5% in revenue for its Ad-Supported segment, caused by higher music licensing costs and rising engagement. Within the premium segment, costs for video podcasts rose, but revenue outpaced them.
Patreon and the direct-to-fan model
Alongside the advertising and platform channels, Owl & Co. tracks one more revenue line, direct-to-fan subscriptions. In April 2026 Patreon announced that podcasters on the platform earned $629 million in 2025, up 33% year on year. More than 47,000 podcasters have paying revenue, and 7.6 million users pay for subscriptions in the podcast category. “Podcasts are a resonant medium. They work well for multihyphenate creators who want to leverage several types of media formats to connect with their fans,” said Paige Fitzgerald, COO of Patreon.
According to Patreon, podcasting is now the platform’s largest revenue category. A publisher with audio revenue on Apple and Spotify, video monetisation on YouTube and paid subscriptions on Patreon draws on several distribution channels in parallel, with a single production cost base.
What the report does not measure
Lopez added a clarification of his own below Carman’s LinkedIn post. “Our report covered the revenue side alone, but the costs of doing video right (economic and otherwise) are not trivial.” The costs of video sets, editing, distribution, lighting and presenter time beyond audio production are not included in Owl & Co.’s report. The figure of $9.2 billion reflects gross revenue. The firm does not publish net profit. Growth came from publishers who added extra video production capacity to their audio engineering.
Europe has no comparable report
IAB Europe reported for 2024 that the European digital advertising market passed €100 billion for the first time, at €118.9 billion, but it does not publish a separate podcast breakdown in its European methodology. According to the Market Data Forecast Europe Podcast Market Report 2025, the UK leads Europe with year-on-year growth in podcast advertising spend of 25%. For advertisers in Prague or Vienna, this means the podcast investment benchmark is currently measured through the UK and the American Spotify revenue split. A local European figure comparable with Owl & Co.’s $9.2 billion does not exist.
Opening the Spotify Distribution API to hosts such as Acast and Podigee means that, for the first time, European publishers have the same video monetisation stack in their hands as American companies. Measurement, however, is split. Spotify reports engagement within its platform, YouTube reports in its analytics, and Patreon reports in its subscription model. There is no unified European standard for cross-platform attribution of the video podcast listener.
This article was prepared with the help of an AI assistant and approved by the editor, Tereza Tiller.
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