In the year 2025, podcasts feel inescapable. Everyone’s a podcaster, and everything is a podcast. It wasn’t always like this.

The birth of the podcast is largely tied to the creation of the RSS audio feed in 2001, though the term “podcast” wasn’t coined until 2004. The following year, Steve Jobs declared that “Apple is taking podcasting mainstream” when the company made podcasts accessible in iTunes (it’s now celebrating the 20-year milestone with a curated list of 20 of the most impactful shows from the past two decades). But the true mainstreaming of the medium didn’t really happen until nearly a decade later, when Apple released a standalone podcast app in 2012, followed by the debut of megahit Serial in 2014. After that, podcasting was officially supercharged. Podcasts became all but essential advertising channels for major tech and media companies, with podcast ad revenue climbing past the $1 billion mark in 2021, and seemingly everyone with a platform—from actors to ad execs—getting behind a microphone.

MORE HERE