New Ovum study finds that podcasts will be a $1 billion market by 2020

08 May 2018

Provided by Consumer & Entertainment Services |

Ovum’s Global Podcast Market Forecast 2017-22, the first comprehensive sizing of the global podcast market, predicts that podcasts will be a $1 billion market by 2020. Ovum’s research finds that by the end of 2017 there were 484 million podcast listeners worldwide and that global podcast advertising revenue had reached $490 million. There’s every reason to expect the rapid growth of the podcast market in recent years will continue as consumers continue to switch to on-demand content, attracting the interest both advertisers and tech companies such as Apple and Spotify.

“Podcasts are now at the point of transition from a niche to a mass-market medium. The growth of podcasts is part of the wider trend towards on-demand, personalised content. More and more people are choosing to listen to the specific content they want at a time convenient to them, and that applies just as much to spoken-word audio as any other form of entertainment. Recent moves by Apple, Google and Spotify to deepen their podcast offerings show that, as well as traditional media companies, the tech giants are also waking up to the size of the opportunity.” – Liam Deane, Senior Analyst on Ovum’s Digital Media team.