It’s not so long since Spotify overtaking Apple was the big story in podcasting market-share-land. However, Spotify is now facing its own disrupter in the form of YouTube.
Edison Research has published some new figures from its UK data, claiming that 29% of British weekly podcast listeners now cite YouTube as the service they use the most for this listening.
That’s ahead of the 28% who use Spotify – the first time YouTube has out-ranked its rival in this data. In fact, YouTube’s share has grown from 20% in 2024 to 29% now, while Spotify’s has fallen from 34% to 28% in the same period.
Obligatory caveat: this is a metric based on people’s primary podcast platform. We don’t know how many are using both YouTube and Spotify – just the latter a bit less – and so this isn’t a measurement of total users.
Also interesting, homegrown platform BBC Sounds is the primary service for 15% of listeners, ahead of Apple Podcasts’ 10% share – although both of these have remained relatively steady since 2024.
As with music-streaming, who’s narrowly ahead of behind matters a bit in terms of bragging rights, but the real story is one of healthy competition: rivals pushing one another to keep innovating. It’s just that the key rivalry now is Spotify versus YouTube rather than Spotify versus Apple.
