NEW YORK—After revising its data, the research firm eMarketer said it believes the U.S. podcast audience “grew tremendously in 2019, as significant investments from major audio streaming services made podcast content more accessible.” In a recent post, eMarketer said it now estimates that there were 92 million monthly U.S. podcast listeners in 2019, which would mark an increase of more than 15 million from the firm’s previous estimate of 76.4 million listeners.

Even though the coronavirus pandemic may have interrupted this growth—the “quarantine measures have altered podcast listening habits”—eMarketer expects continued growth for podcasting in 2020. “Despite the disruption, we still expect the U.S. podcast audience will grow 14.8 percent this year, reaching 105.6 million listeners,” the firm said in its recent post. 

"Since mid-March, we've seen a decrease in time spent listening to podcasts," Peter Vahle, an eMarketer forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in the post. "However, we expect listening habits will return to normal in the second half of the year, so that by the end of 2020, we'll see the strong growth in podcast listeners we were anticipating."

The mainstream success of several podcasts—“Serial” in late 2014, “S-Town” in 2017 and the rise of political podcasts like “The Daily” and “Pod Save America” after the 2016 election—helped introduce the medium to a wider demographic, eMarketer said.

Another factor contributing to the growth of podcast listening is the consumer adoption of smart speakers and audio streaming services. In 2019, the number of U.S. smart speaker users grew nearly 22 percent year to more than 73 million, and U.S. digital audio listeners surpassed 206 million, according to eMarketer.

In addition, recent research supports the claim that podcast listeners are a highly engaged audience, eMarketer noted. Citing October 2019 research from Westwood One, eMarketer said 36 percent of U.S. podcast listeners said they listened to 6 or more hours of podcast content per week, and one-third of the podcast audience said they listened to between 3 and 5 hours per week.

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