Here's a number that stopped me mid-scroll: most podcast publishers tracked by Podtrac just posted growth, month over month. Not flat. Not a handful of winners and a pile of losers. Most.

That's not nothing. Podcasting has been around long enough now that "most shows are growing" isn't the easy headline it was in 2015. Back then everything was growing because almost nothing existed yet. This is different. This is an established industry, full of competition for your ears, still finding more listeners every month.

So why does that matter to you, sitting wherever you're sitting right now?

Because podcasts have quietly become one of the most flexible ways to learn, laugh, and stay connected to the world — especially if your life doesn't look like everyone else's.

I spend a lot of my time in places where there's no TV, no local newspaper, and sometimes no reliable internet until I find a café with decent wifi. What I always have is my phone and a pair of earbuds. Driving across New Mexico, waiting out a delayed flight in some airport I didn't plan to be stuck in, walking a few miles to find dinner in a town I'd never heard of a week earlier — podcasts fill those gaps. They don't ask for a schedule. They don't care if you're sitting on a couch or standing in line at a border crossing.

That's the real story behind Podtrac's numbers, I think. It's not just that publishers are growing. It's that the format itself keeps proving it fits into real, messy, unpredictable lives — the kind where you can't always plan your day around a 7 p.m. broadcast.

TALKERS magazine has been tracking this industry closely for a reason. Radio people watch podcast numbers the way sailors watch the wind — it tells them where things are heading. And when "most" publishers are growing month over month instead of just a few big names, that tells you the audience itself is expanding, not just shifting from one show to another.

Which raises a question I can't help but ask: what happens if you're not actually using podcasts the way you could be?

A lot of people still think of podcasts as background noise for a commute. Fair enough — that's how plenty of us started. But I've found some of my best discoveries about places I'm about to visit came from a podcast episode somebody recommended out of nowhere. A history of a city I hadn't thought twice about. A conversation with someone who'd lived somewhere for forty years and knew exactly which back road to take. That's not noise. That's research, disguised as entertainment.

I didn't plan on becoming a podcast listener in my late 60s. I didn't plan on a lot of things — full-time travel wasn't exactly the retirement plan most people expect either. But that's the thing about staying curious: you don't need a five-year plan to try something new. You just need to ask, "why not?" and see what happens.

If growth numbers like these tell us anything, it's that more people are asking that same question. They're finding shows about history, business, true crime, travel, health, comedy — whatever scratches the itch — and they're sticking with them long enough to become regular listeners. That's what "month-over-month growth" really means in plain English: people come back.

So here's my actual suggestion, since data points are only useful if they move you to do something. Pick one show you've been meaning to try. Not ten. One. Listen to it on your next walk, your next long drive, your next flight delay. See if it earns a second episode.

That's really all adventure ever is — trying the next thing and seeing if it's worth the next step. Podcasts, like travel, like aging, like almost everything worth doing, reward the people who just start.

What are you curious about today?

Source: TALKERS magazine

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