Last year Netflix jumped head first into the world of podcasting and made big-dollar deals with a large number of media companies to host their shows, but a year later the streamer’s engagement numbers are still very low.
Last October, Netflix made the grand announcement of its partnership with Spotify Studios and The Ringer to be the exclusive home of their popular podcasts — including The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Zach Lowe Show, The McShay Show, Fairway Rollin’, The Mismatch, The Ringer F1 Show, The Ringer Fantasy Football Show, The Ringer NFL Show, and The Ringer NBA Show according to Awful Announcing.
That wasn’t all. Netflix also made a separate deal for eight figures with Barstool Sports for their shows, as well. And then came deals with iHeartMedia and several others.
But so far, all these deals with high-profile companies and personalities have not seemed to help Netflix soar to the top of the podcast list.
Puck’s Matthew Belloni noted that Netflix’s shows are still not topping the charts.
“To date, no video podcast has charted on Nielsen’s weekly top 10, which Netflix tends to dominate, and multiple company sources have told me that the podcast engagement numbers on the whole are low,” Belloni wrote.
The numbers are in line with the rest of the streamers’ stats, though.
“The company’s most recent Engagement Report,” Belloni added, “revealed total hours viewed in the second half of 2025 increased by just 2 percent while MoffettNathanson estimated that the global user base grew by 10 percent, ‘which translates to an 8 percent decline in daily engagement per subscriber.’”
It isn’t that Netflix has no audience at all, though. According to Edison Podcast Metrics, 14 percent of the weekly podcast users are listening to podcasts hosted by Netflix.
In any case, as of now, the Netflix field of podcasts are not achieving the financial success that Netflix may have hoped.
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