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Sounds Profitable · Wednesday · 12 min

Tu-Dum

This week Tom Webster comes back from his Podcast Movement keynote in New York with a number that should stop the industry cold. Across four years of The Podcast Landscape, the study has asked people every place they have consumed a podcast in the past year, and the third most-named platform is no longer Apple Podcasts. It is Netflix. Tom lays out why that ranking troubles him, and why he thinks 2026 is another one of those turning-point moments for the medium. Tom gets into: Why Netflix landed at number three, and what a deliberately low-bar survey question does and does not tell us The three reasons Netflix worries him, from the gatekeeper problem to the fates of shows like Mindhunter and The OA How the top three places people find podcasts all reward deliberate search over discovery, with 77% of YouTube discovery coming from intentional search The quiet slide of podcast-native apps, down from 19% to 15% as most-used, and what it means to lose our "Tower Records" Plus why Tom worries the rush toward Netflix could turn podcasting, for much of America, into Temu TV, and what the industry should be protecting instead. Read the full issue here.

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This week Tom Webster comes back from his Podcast Movement keynote in New York with a number that should stop the industry cold. Across four years of The Podcast Landscape, the study has asked people every place they have consumed a podcast in the past year, and the third most-named platform is no longer Apple Podcasts. It is Netflix. Tom lays out why that ranking troubles him, and why he thinks 2026 is another one of those turning-point moments for the medium.

Tom gets into:

  • Why Netflix landed at number three, and what a deliberately low-bar survey question does and does not tell us
  • The three reasons Netflix worries him, from the gatekeeper problem to the fates of shows like Mindhunter and The OA
  • How the top three places people find podcasts all reward deliberate search over discovery, with 77% of YouTube discovery coming from intentional search
  • The quiet slide of podcast-native apps, down from 19% to 15% as most-used, and what it means to lose our "Tower Records"

Plus why Tom worries the rush toward Netflix could turn podcasting, for much of America, into Temu TV, and what the industry should be protecting instead.

Read the full issue here.

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