YouTube Is Beating Spotify in the Podcast Wars

Spotify is king of music streaming, but it’s simply not the best in podcast land.

On Wednesday, YouTube announced it has hit 1 billion monthly podcast viewers. Google-owned YouTube has been coming up in the audio-streaming space, and has ambitions to rival the world’s biggest music streamer, Spotify, but in the podcast space it can leverage what was already at the core of its business: video.

Hand to Pod

Rewind a few years, and Spotify was all-in on podcasts. In 2020, it signed a deal with mega-popular podcaster Joe Rogan for a reported $200 million that gave Spotify the right to exclusively host his podcast, which is filmed, on its platform. It also signed a podcasting deal with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle worth a reported $20 million. In 2024, Spotify’s commitment to Rogan still seemed rock solid — it re-signed him for a reported $250 million — but the exclusivity clause had been dropped, and Spotify’s overall commitment to podcasting was less enthusiastic after investing $1 billion in a celebrity-heavy strategy that did not convert to profits. 

Spotify has since scaled back its podcasting ambitions, along with 17% of its total workforce, and turned its first-ever annual profit in 2024. Despite the overall streamlining, Spotify has been keen to push further into video content. There, however, is where YouTube has the upper hand:

• Spotify said in a press release in June last year that over 170 million users have watched a video podcast on Spotify. There’s no time-stamp on those users, so it’s nowhere near as beefy as YouTube’s monthly figure.
• Tim Katz, vice president for partnerships at YouTube, told Bloomberg that the company was seeing natural migration of podcast listeners to the platform, and it was just a question of “pouring some gas on it.” E.g., YouTube started offering $300,000 deals to podcasters who were willing to convert their podcasts to a video format for the platform.

The Original Tube: YouTube’s video podcast dominance is most observable not on people’s phones or laptops, but on their TVs. The company wrapped up 2024 with the stat that viewers were piping video podcasts into their living rooms at a rate of 400 million hours per month. If Netflix trained us to binge on TV shows, what will we do with the bottomless content fountain that is YouTube?