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YouTube has announced that it’s launched a podcasts chart. The top 100 is here - it’s weekly, updated every Wednesday. Unlike other podcast charts, the YouTube chart is ranked by watch-time.
- YouTube “generally” defines a podcast as a playlist designated as a “podcast” by the creator in the upload process.
- Bumper has discovered that the available data goes back to Mar 18, 2025. Joe Rogan has been #1 every week.
- It’s a US chart only. The company is “expanding podcast charts to additional regions.”
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YouTube has also, quietly, updated the YouTube Podcasts homepage in the US to be editorially curated. It highlights podcasts as square podcast artwork, and editorially curates them into different rails (“Award-winning”, “Music minded”, “In conversation with”, “Gaming and sport”, etc). Viewers in other countries get the older, algorithmic page that contains 16:9 video thumbnails, including many things that aren’t really podcasts. Compare these two screenshots - YouTube Podcasts in the US, and YouTube Podcasts in Australia. This change appears to only be in place in the US.
- One of the concerns for our industry highlighted in the Podnews Report Card this year was the YouTube podcasts homepage, with comments that the company “needs to invest in editorial curation to be taken more seriously”.
- Spotify announced a change in the way they will display play-counts for podcasts. "To help celebrate growth, plays will be presented as incremental milestones instead of precise figures, beginning once an episode hits 50K plays. Creators will still see their precise numbers in their private dashboards." There's more detail in the Spotify for Creators blog.
- The actual definition of a play remains undocumented by Spotify - and by YouTube; but we do know that they are worked out very differently to Apple Podcasts plays. None of the statistics from Apple, Spotify's app, or YouTube are certified under the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines.
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