Today, when short videos are sweeping the world, why are podcasts still popular in the United States? Is it the difference in cultural soil or the sophistication of the product mechanism? This article provides an in-depth analysis of the underlying logic of the US podcast market from multiple dimensions such as user habits, platform ecology, and business model, and also provides a perspective for domestic content product users to rethink the value of “slow content”.
On June 18, OpenAI launched its own podcast on YouTube, revealing the behind-the-scenes story of ChatGPT, which has been launched in two episodes so far. Musk is also a frequent guest on many podcasts.
Even the most cutting-edge technology representatives such as OpenAI and Musk are doing podcasts, which shows the popularity of this form.
What impressed me the most was that during the 2024 U.S. election, Trump abandoned many traditional TV interviews, such as CBS’s Ace show “60 Minutes”, and instead frequently participated in 14 podcasts.
I flipped through the data and found that the United States is the most popular country in the world to listen to blogs.
According to a 2024 EdisonResearch survey, 70% of people over the age of 12 in the United States have listened to podcasts at least once, and 43% listen weekly. During the same period, the UK listened 26% monthly, Germany 19%, and Japan 13%. Americans listen to podcasts on average 8.3 hours a week, twice as many as in most countries in Europe.
In short, in the United States, there are 1 in 2 podcast listeners, a rate and activity that is unimaginable in other countries.
Why do Americans love listening to podcasts so much?
1. Low-context society
It’s not so much that Americans like to listen to podcasts, but rather that they prefer to talk. The United States has long had a unique speaking tradition. To put it more bluntly, Americans are more talkative than French and Japanese.
There is a British cultural scholar named Hall, who proposed the theory of “high-low context” in “TheSilentLanguage”.
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He divides culture into low-context culture and high-context culture: high-context culture relies more on a common context, often there is a situation where there is a word in the word, and the information is buried in the eyes, tone, silence and relationship network; There is always room for discourse, and East Asian countries such as Japan and China are the most typical.
East Asian countries have thousands of years of writing and imperial examination traditions, and written expression is not only a means of storing knowledge, but also has the function of maintaining etiquette and authority.
In such a cultural soil, students in East Asian countries have to undergo a lot of writing training from primary and secondary school, which is in stark contrast to the United States’ emphasis on oral presentations and classroom discussions.
The reason for the formation of this culture is related to social homogeneity, and the more single the ethnic group and language in a country, the easier it is to form a shared context and tend to a high-context culture.
Immigrant countries such as the United States and Australia are at the other end: immigrants from all over the world come from all over the world with their own cultural backgrounds, and strangers need to quickly judge whether they are friendly or not. Newcomers quickly discover that it is safer to speak up than to be silent.
Therefore, Americans prefer direct and clear language expression. This communication style emphasizes the integrity of sentences and the transparency of meaning. Speech has long been regarded as a civic quality, and everyone is encouraged to “speak up” from Show & Tell in elementary school to public speaking in college.
This model gives American society a natural respect for “spoken word and expression”: in business negotiations, social parties and even election rallies, “speaking well” often means mastering the rhythm and winning resources.
So the smalltalk in life becomes a lubricant: ask “Whereareyoufrom?” It will not be considered offensive, but a polite opening.
If you casually strike up a conversation in the New York subway, you will most likely get a warm response; Even a casual phrase of “Niceweather” in an elevator is enough to add a touch of humanity to a brief awkwardness – the urge to treat strangers as potential conversation partners is not common in the big cities of Northern Europe or East Asia.
Of course, high and low contexts are not clearly dichotomous opposites, and each culture may present a mixture of high and low characteristics in different scenarios. For example, although the UK is classified as a low-context culture as a whole, it often intersperses polite hints in expressions in interpersonal communication; Although Japan is known for its high context, there is also a younger generation that is more directly influenced by the Internet.
To summarize: In a low-context cultural environment, Americans prefer more direct oral communication, which has shaped the American speaking tradition to a certain extent. The media change that followed and the wave of secondary colloquialization further pushed the United States into the podcast society.
2. The second wave of oral language
The so-called secondaryorality is a concept proposed by scholar Walter J. Ong in “Oral Language and Literature”. It refers to the reactivation of the community function of oral communication by electronic media (radio, television, podcasts, etc.) on top of the civilization of writing and printing, which is neither different from the redundancy of native spoken language nor simple text reading, but a “new spoken language” form that integrates writing and spoken interaction.
In short, it is not simply converting words into sound, but retaining the structure and logic of written writing, while restoring the instant interaction and community participation of spoken language.
This can be seen everywhere in early radio, talk shows, and today’s podcasts: hosts often rely on written manuscript preparation, but insert listener feedback at any time, both with the rigor of the script and the flexibility of the dialogue.
President Roosevelt’s “FiresideChats” in 1933 were an important turning point.
At that time, the United States was hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Every Sunday night, Roosevelt would engage in dialogue with audiences across the country on the radio, explaining policies such as banking reform, job assistance, and social security, in a relaxed and humane tone. At that time, the proportion of listening households was as high as 65%, corresponding to about 60 million listeners.
Unlike previous boring political speeches, “fireside chats” seem to invite the president to the people’s living rooms, forming a strong sense of closeness. This model not only reshaped Americans’ trust in oral communication, but also laid the foundation for the later establishment of TalkRadio and podcasts.
By the 1950s–60s, TalkRadio had evolved into a round-the-clock audio platform that integrated political commentary, talk shows, call inquiries, life advice, and cultural discussions, and became the home of American public opinion. That round-the-clock, open-ended collision of views has developed the collective habit of Americans to accompany life with their ears and express themselves with audio. The hosts of RushLimbaugh and Howard Stern have an average of more than 10 million listeners per day, and elections and social movements rely on microphones to bring rhythm.
The program not only forms a “sense of presence” in audio, but also forms a multi-touch listener ecology through mailing listener letters, street meetings and later phone recordings.
In contrast, mainstream broadcasting in countries such as Britain, France, Germany, and Japan during the same period was more single-functional. The British BBCRadio operates strictly by channels: the news band broadcasts news throughout the day, and the music and culture channel focuses on elegant art; French radio places more emphasis on cultural programs and official announcements, and is less interactive; Germany’s ARD and ZDF focus on journalism and education, with talk shows focused on in-depth reporting sessions during the afternoon or evening hours; Japan’s NHK also focuses on news, drama, and history columns, and rarely has all-weather interactive shows.
3. Subscription revolution
Compared with small European countries, the United States is an automobile country, with cities and suburbs often dozens of kilometers apart, and an average commute time of about 26 minutes is normal. During rush hour every day, tens of millions of drivers crowd on the highway, unable to look at the screen with their mobile phones, and can only rely on sound to pass the boring time.
Thus, Drive-TimeRadio was born in North America, specializing in news, talk shows and traffic updates during the morning and evening rush hours; After entering the era of smartphones, this trend of “listening to podcasts while driving” has been seamlessly connected, and podcasts have become standard on the road. Both professionals and delivery drivers spend a lot of fragmented time behind the wheel, allowing audio content to blend naturally into everyday life.
The technological turning point occurred in 2004. That year, Adam Curry and DaveWiner embedded audio content into RSS, and for the first time, “automatic subscription + push” was realized, and the podcast changed from radio content to a new track that everyone could play.
“Podcasts” no longer rely on radio frequency or a single platform, but realize content synchronization and push across devices and platforms in an open standard and decentralized way.
In February 2004, the British newspaper The Guardian used the term “podcast” to name this emerging medium for the first time by merging “pod” (borrowed from Apple’s iPod) and “cast” (from broadcast) when talking about the rapid rise of “online broadcast” with the help of iPods, cheap audio software and blogs.
I remember that in 2005, Apple iTunes version 4.9 launched the podcast catalog, and the number of programs soared from 3,000 to 15,000 in half a year, with more than 100 million downloads.
TWiT, TheRickyGervaisShow, NPR’s early podcasts, the content type suddenly opened the ceiling. During that time, the mainstream technology circle in the United States was discussing whether podcasts were “blogs in audio”?
Now that this judgment is correct, podcasts have become another outlet for content entrepreneurship in the United States.
Soon, the mainstream media smelled a business opportunity. NPR directly moved “ThisAmericanLife” to the podcast, with a single episode downloaded millions of times and won consecutive awards; The New York Times is not far behind, launching “TheDaily” in 2017, which has become the hottest news podcast in the United States, with more than 200 million downloads per month in 2023. PBS and local public media were also involved, and educational, children’s, and cultural audio were filled.
This wave is not only a content upgrade, but also a key that advertisers and high-quality users have followed suit. Users over the age of 35 with an annual income of more than $100,000 account for 30% of the American podcast circle, which is higher than YouTube and TikTok.
4. Enter the mainstream public
Despite its rapid development, podcasts are still a niche form of media in the United States, and its entry into the mainstream was the popularity of the podcast “Serial” in 2014.
The show presents the whole process of host Sarah Koenig’s investigation of a murder 15 years ago through sound, and people are surprised to find that the podcast is as exciting as an American drama.
With over 100 million downloads in its first season, Serial proves one thing: podcasts can carry serious narratives and high-quality sound theater, rather than just serving news flashes or interviews.
It was also from 2014 that a large number of VCs and advertisers began to really pay attention to the podcast industry.
From 2015 to 2018, nearly 20 podcast or audio technology companies such as GimletMedia, Panoply, and Stitcher received tens of millions of dollars in financing.
In 2019, Spotify acquired Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast for a total of nearly $400 million. Amazon bought Wondery for $300 million in 2020, and SiriusXM bought Stitcher for $325 million. Major technology companies have made podcasts a core investment in their content strategy, and capital is pouring in.
According to EdisonResearch data, the total number of podcasts in the United States was about 180,000 in 2015, exceeded 700,000 in 2019, and reached more than 4 million in 2023.
The creator structure has also quietly changed, with individual anchors and small teams accounting for the vast majority, and more and more journalists, writers, celebrities, and university professors have also begun to do personal podcasts. Podcasts have moved from the fringes to the mainstream, from grassroots to professional.
The advertising market also continues to expand. The IAB reported that the U.S. podcast advertising market was only $105 million in 2015, surpassed $700 million in 2019, reached $2.6 billion in 2023, and exceeded $4.2 billion in 2024.
While commercialization has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, the cultural attributes of podcasts have become more and more prominent. Various community topics such as #MeToo, BLM, and Asian equality have formed their own micro-ecology by relying on podcasts to speak out and attract fans.
Podcasts in the United States have a tendency: they are transforming from “content” to “community cultural media”, expressing a new position of identity and position.
But in my opinion, this is not a good thing. The program has become a labeled circle, reinforcing the values of the same circle, weakening the possibility of cross-group dialogue, and may exacerbate the tears in American society. If podcasts become a tool for identity politics and content creation increasingly relies on position marketing, will it erase the original diversity and openness attributes?
Finally, how is the development of podcasts in China compared to the United States?
My observation is that it is fast and promising, but it is still non-mainstream.
In fact, an important sign to judge whether a media form has become mainstream is whether the relevant departments have opened a strong regulatory model.
So far, the state has had a number of special rectification activities around micro-short dramas, while podcasts have not been included in the scope of key special governance. This in itself speaks to the current status of podcasts in the country.
