by Tom Webster
Tom reflects on the first podcast he subscribed to, and how audiences are finding podcasts today.

In 2006, I flew to my first conference about podcasting, mostly because it was my job to pay attention to the new things people were doing with audio, and podcasting was the newest of them. The room was small. It had the particular energy you get when a few hundred people believe they are early to something and aren't yet sure whether that makes them visionaries or fools. A few creators got up to talk about what they were making. One of them was Todd Cochrane, who we lost last year, and whose Geek News Central was, as best I can reconstruct it, the first podcast I ever subscribed to.

I'll be honest about why I subscribed: it wasn't the show, at first. It was the medium. I was in that room because podcasting itself was interesting to me, a new way to move audio around, a thing worth understanding. Todd happened to be standing where I decided to care. The show came second.

For about fifteen years, that was a perfectly good way to grow an audience. You could win people over by getting them interested in podcasting as an idea, and a good number of the people listening today arrived more or less the way I did. Curious about the format, then captured by a show once they got there. That era is over, and I don't think it's coming back.

The people who were going to try podcasting because podcasting is novel have already tried it. The audience that remains, the one every show is now competing for, does not care about podcasting as its own special snowflake. They don't wake up curious about the medium. They care about a host, or a story, delivered in whatever form happens to reach them. Audio in the car, video on the couch, a ninety-second clip in a feed they opened for an entirely different reason.

We have new research coming on June 18 that puts numbers to this, and the numbers are not subtle. When you ask listeners where they found their current favorite show, YouTube comes back first by a wide margin, named by 40 percent of them. The social feeds cluster behind it. The tools many podcast promoters spend time on, the trailers and the cross-promos and the browsing inside podcast apps, tell a much quieter story. Read that next to where listeners actually started, and the pattern is hard to miss: the growth of this medium is happening outside the medium. The places that introduce people to shows are not, for the most part, podcast places. They are the places people already are.

Which brings me to the most important finding, and the most neglected because it's harder to manage. When we asked listeners how they find new shows, the highest-trust answer by a mile was also the simplest one. A friend told them. Most listeners get their podcast recommendations from people they know, and the large majority say they're likely to act on one. Among the most engaged listeners, the ones on Spotify, the ones on X, the ones who already follow a host's recommendations, that willingness to act climbs higher still. Nothing else in the data comes close. And almost no launch plan I have ever seen has a line item for it.

We can budget for trailers and cross-promo spots, the line items the data ranks near the bottom, while the single most persuasive thing that can happen to a prospective listener, a person they trust telling them to go listen, sits in almost every plan as a hope rather than a strategy. We don't typically manage a "friends and family" profit & loss line. I think that's because word of mouth feels like weather. Something that happens to you. You make a good show, and if you're lucky, people talk about it. But the research, and the reframe I opened with, point somewhere more useful than luck.

If the undiscovered audience no longer cares about the medium, then two things have to change about how we work:

The first is how we describe our own shows. For years we described them to each other in the language of the medium. We talked about feeds and apps and subscribers and download numbers. None of that means anything to a person who has never thought of themselves as a podcast listener and never will. They need to know what the show is about, who is in it, and why they should care, in a sentence they could repeat to someone else without sounding strange. If your show can't be described in a way that travels by mouth, it won't.

The second is harder, and it's the part most of us skip. We have to train our listeners to recommend us, and we have to be willing to ask them to. Not in a grasping way. But the listener who loves your show is rarely sitting on a clean, repeatable way to tell a friend about it. Give them one. A clip worth forwarding. A description short enough to text. A reason, in this episode, that someone they know specifically would want to hear it. The work of being recommendable is real work, and it is almost entirely undone.

You cannot manufacture word of mouth, and that is the catch. The instant it feels engineered, it stops being the thing that works. The reason a friend's recommendation carries so many listeners toward a show is that it is not marketing. It is trust. And trust does not survive being turned into a growth tactic. So the honest version of building for word of mouth is not a clever referral mechanic or a hashtag campaign. It is making something genuinely worth recommending, and then removing every small friction between a listener loving it and a listener being able to say so. You earn the recommendation. You can only make it easier to give.

For anyone with a show to grow, the practical implication is concrete. Stop spending the marketing budget exclusively on the bottom of the discovery list. Put real effort into being findable where people already are, and put real effort into your most enthusiastic listeners, the small group who would tell others if you gave them something to tell. That is not a launch-week push. It's a year-long habit.

Which takes me back to that room in 2006. I have always told the story as if I found Todd's show because I cared about podcasting. And I did. But that's not actually how anyone else I knew found it. They found it because I came home and wouldn't shut up about it. The first podcast I ever loved spread the only way that has ever really mattered. One person telling another. We spent twenty years building everything around that except the thing itself.

We're digging into all of this on June 18, in a webinar called The Podcast Discovery Playbook 2026, featuring brand new data from The Podcast Landscape. I'll be co-hosting with Roger Nairn, from JAR Podcast Solutions, who will be there to translate my ethereal research jargon into what the heck marketers are actually supposed to do about it. If discovery is on your mind, and at this point it should be on everyone's, come spend an hour with us. Stats and jokes, plus a live Q&A. How can you pass it up? Registration is live here.

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