For over a decade, the word “podcast” has grown in popularity. It seems like everyone, at some point, decided they were going to be a podcast host. It was hot, it was fun, it was “the thing” to go do.

But as podcasting matures, there’s a trend developing: Podcasting is becoming more like radio. And the power of personality is winning out.

A Slowing Boom

According to Listen Notes, 563,571 podcasts have been active so far in 2026. That figure already more than doubles each annual total from 2024 and 2025. Meanwhile, only 113,332 new shows debuted through September, putting 2026 on pace for its fewest podcast launches in ten years. Additionally, AI-generated shows made up roughly 29% of third-quarter launches.

The podcast space appears to be slowing down in terms of pure volume, while the heavy hitters are driving much of the growth in listening.

That sounds a lot like radio.

Across the country, and in individual markets, there isn’t a massive boom of new, fresh, live and local personalities. But the established personalities are still driving ratings and revenue, both locally and nationally.

There’s nothing shocking about this. It was bound to happen.

The Myth of the Easy Podcast

Another conclusion is that the podcast game was never as easy as some wanted to make it out to be. The idea that any celebrity could attach their name to a show and automatically bring along a built-in audience was always a fool’s errand.

But that didn’t stop companies from throwing gobs of money at celebrities who couldn’t hold a candle to some great local radio talent in markets across the country.

Putting out a consistent product on a daily, or at least weekly, basis is hard. It’s not digging ditches, but it’s also not what many celebrities expected when they cracked a mic for the first time to record their inaugural podcast episode. Getting an audience to return every time in an increasingly crowded space proved even more difficult.

Personalities Get Followed

Every successful media platform eventually arrives at the same conclusion: Content gets sampled. Personalities get followed.

Some may conclude that simply means the rich are getting richer. That’s true. But that’s how radio has always worked. Howard Stern. Rush Limbaugh. Colin Cowherd. The list goes on. The best succeed because they keep people’s attention, and they keep them coming back for more.

Listeners build habits around personalities they care about and trust, not an RSS feed. And in radio, even a station brand, while still enormous and powerful, can become secondary in today’s fragmented media climate to the personality itself. We see it more every day as big personalities learn to thrive on their own without a large corporate backer.

Radio’s Superpower

That should be encouraging for radio talent. The skills required to win in podcasting — consistency, storytelling, preparation, audience connection and creating habitual listening — are skills great radio hosts have been developing for decades. The opportunity is there if radio personalities stop viewing themselves strictly as radio hosts and start viewing themselves as personalities who can reach an audience anywhere.

In news/talk radio, we sometimes obsess over technology. Apps. Streams. Social media. Digital distribution. Those things matter. But the biggest podcasts aren’t winning because they’re on a better platform. They’re winning because listeners feel connected to the host.

That’s always been radio’s superpower. The listener knows when you will be there, how long you will be there, and what you will be serving up. Oh, and as AI content grows in podcasting, listeners know their radio personality (at least in the news/talk format) isn’t some AI chatbot.

For years, radio has worried about podcasting replacing it. But as podcasting matures, it increasingly looks like radio’s business model with newer technology attached.

The biggest names win. Consistency matters. Trust matters. Personality matters most.

The podcast boom may be slowing. But the personality era is just getting started.

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