As the media landscape continues to shift (traditional outlets closing, significant layoffs of journalists, great reliance on AI-drafted articles), one medium has exploded in recent years: podcasts.
Early on (what’s the first podcast you remember? Mine is The Ricky Gervais Show featuring Ricky, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington from 2005), podcasts were a bit of a novelty, but they grew quickly in popularity, until Serial delivered them straight to the mainstream, garnering 68 million downloads in season one and becoming the first podcast to win a Peabody Award. Since then everyone you talk to knows all about podcasts and has their personal favorite. According to Podcast Statistics, there are now 4.52 million podcasts with an estimated 600 million podcast listeners worldwide.
Source: Podcast Statistics
Now with the ubiquity of podcasts and the relative ease to produce them, many veteran journalists are opting for independence. As Ayelet Noff of SlicedBrand noted in a Forbes Agency Council roundtable article discussing media trends in 2025, “Podcasts and newsletters have become quite easy to get up and running these days and can be very successful, leading to a more fragmented media landscape. For us in PR, that means we need to forge more relationships with niche creators, not just traditional media outlets.”
Ms. Noff is absolutely right in her assessment, and I’d add this trend has created new opportunities for media coverage, interviews and thought leadership. For nearly every topic imaginable, there’s at least one podcast covering it, and usually many. Quite often, these podcasts seek guests to interview, industry news to cover and trends to discuss. While not every podcast has as many listeners as NPR, smaller podcasts provide excellent value in terms of target audience. Got a client in the shipping and logistics industry? Here are the 25 Best Logistics Industry Podcasts according to FeedSpot. How about a legal tech client? Here are 16 Legal Tech Podcasts to Help You Stay Up to Date in 2026 from The Legal Practice. Cannabis industry? Try the Best 80 Cannabis Podcasts in the U.S. from Million Podcasts. Think of these podcasts as trade publications for the industries they serve.
Of course, any PR firm worth its salt must review, vet and pitch the right podcasts for its clients. While plenty of opportunity exists, not every podcast is a great match. So how do we find the right fit? Luckily, tools exist to help us out. Similar to the traditional media databases like Cision, podcast databases are available like: Podseeker, PodPitch, Podchaser, Podmatch, etc. These databases compile a wealth of information on the available podcasts, including topics, frequency, hosts, estimated number of listeners per episode, contact information and more. This gives us a leg up for finding the right opportunities for clients. From there, we can further vet the podcasts by checking recent guests, listening to episodes to get a sense of the hosts, the tone and the topics they prefer to address, so we can not only narrow down which podcasts to pitch but how best to do so.
For example, we recently had the pleasure of working with Anusia Gillespie, lawyer, legal tech innovator, executive, yoga instructor and author to promote her debut novel Soul Toll. We worked closely with Anusia to develop a targeted podcast outreach plan that focused on books, authorship and wellbeing, landing her appearances on podcasts that fit that niche. More than that, though, it was through this targeted effort that we booked Anusia with the Fit for Joy podcast with host, author and non-profit founder Valeria Koopman. The immediate connection with Valeria prompted Anusia to join the board of 501(c)(3) nonprofit JoyLab, RYT-200 as Vice Chair, and complete a matching fundraising campaign for the Kuai JoyLab.
As with most media outreach in PR, the right fit and audience are important. When it comes to podcasts, that’s not always about volume of listeners and monthly downloads. While we’re happy to land clients on chart-topping podcasts, depending on the topics they want to discuss, a narrow focus can be more fruitful.
Contact us today to discuss how podcasts fit into your PR plans for 2026 and beyond.