Global podcast company Acast has released Podcast Pulse 2025, the latest in its annual report series on global podcast trends. (RAIN’s coverage of the 2024 report is HERE.) The backbone theme of this year’s report describes an evolutionary step into a new era for podcasting, defined by a reshaping of influence, trust, and culture.
Influence
“Podcast creators are redefining influence.” — Acast
That is the opening theme of a detailed 48-page presentation. (It is freely available HERE.) While emphasizing the influence of podcasters, Acast’s study redefines influence itself. “It’s no longer about how many people you can reach, it’s about how deeply you can move them.” Along that line, Acast suggests the role of podcasting is to create an experience that is “curated and fresh,” leaving behind “endless scroll algorithms and recycled content.” Podcasters are not merely entertainers; they shape communities, spark ideas, and shape discourse.
Acast’s idealization of podcasting has application for advertisers too. “For brands, podcast partnerships aren’t about trophy names.” In this view trust and connection are the most valuable currency to a brand, which has the opportunity to “genuine influence at scale.”
“Influence used to be measured by follower counts. Today, it’s earned through time, trust, and ideas. Podcast creators are leading this shift.” — Acast
Resonance
A second theme in Acast’s Podcast Pulse is resonance. A crisp definition is established:
“Resonance is what happens when attention meets trust. That’s what drives action.” — Acast
Podcasting is unique in generating and optimizing these values, combining “massive reach with captivating storytelling.” Acast defines an impressive reach for the category: “Two out of three global consumers monthly.” To be clear: that metric combines audio and video podcast consumption, as illustrated below.
“Podcasts are sought not served, and looked forward to daily.” — Acast
Along the same general lines of influence and resonance, Acast puts a focus on credibility, establishing that podcasting has more of it than social media, YouTubers, and equal to traditional journalists.
Results
All these values help define podcasting’s appeal, but it’s results which matter. The slide below captures survey outcomes related to consumer attitude and reaction:
Culture
If there is an overriding theme in this ambitious survey of the podcast audience, it is that podcasting is at the heart of culture.
“Culture today is fast-moving, fragmented, and fiercely shaped by those who speak with purpose. In this landscape, podcasts aren’t just part of the conversation, they’re leading it.” — Acast Podcast Pulse
In support of that thesis, the survey finds that 72% of daily listeners say podcasts significantly shape the cultural conversation. The research also digs into the extent to which people turn to podcasts during news-breaking events, major sporting events, political elections, and other concentrations of news and culture.
Pitching
Throughout, Acast cites its own shows and hosts to illustrate its points, naturally enough — Pablo Torre gets impressive promotion here, with listening, viewing, and social statistics adding up to a direct advertiser pitch in the midst of a large-scale statistical report.
“Low risk, high reward” — this idea comes late in the presentation, emphasizing that podcast advertising is not just effective, but safe. The thrust there is that podcast advertising avoids the risks of “brand irritation or offense” compared to other channels.
And this thing
The final content slide, number 47 of a 48-slide deck, is a chart with indexes consumer type (income, gender, education and others) for different age groups, across 10 countries. The chart is below. (Note the error correction in the image caption.)
In the top row, first column, the row identifier should be Age, not Income.
As always, we recommend the source document, which is HERE.
