Yi Yang is a podcast host, producer and media strategist. He co-founded JustPod, China's biggest podcast network, and founded PodFest China. Now based in London, he has contributed to This American Life and the BBC World Service and advises organisations on audio and media strategy. He is launching In Transit, a story-and-strategy practice on transitions in media, in careers, and in a life carried between cultures, beginning with a newsletter.
You can connect with Yi on LinkedIn here.
What’s your podcast origin story?
I started out as a listener of English-language podcasts, and I still am one. At university I stumbled on The Documentary from the BBC World Service . The mp3 files were buried in a batch of English listening practice materials. The first time I heard it, it was unlike anything I had experienced: not just a radio interview, but field recordings, ambient sound, and people and stories from all over the world. I had listened to shortwave radio as a kid, but my ambition had always been television news, which is what I was studying. The idea that radio could do documentaries was completely new to me.
From there I went looking for more: This American Life, Radiolab, 99% Invisible, Planet Money. That was around the time American public radio stations were repackaging their narrative shows as podcasts, so I followed them there. When Serial came out and the whole world wanted to know who killed Hae Min Lee, I was one of them. Then Gimlet Media was founded, more good shows kept appearing, and I started wondering whether narrative podcasting could be brought to China. In 2015 I launched my first podcast. That dream still hasn’t fully come true, but it set me on this road. At first it was a side project, since my day job was as a TV producer, and in 2018 my partner Cheng Yanliang and I founded JustPod.
Give us an overview of China’s podcasting industry from its beginnings and what stage it’s at currently. Is it growing? Is it stagnating?
Chinese-language podcasts have existed for as long as the concept of podcasting has. But in those years the mainstream of the Chinese internet was blogs, social media and streaming platforms, much as it was elsewhere. The real starting point, to my mind, was 2018. That was when we launched our flagship show Left-Right (忽左忽右), an interview podcast in the spirit of NPR’s Fresh Air or BBC’s In Our Time, originally hosted by Yanliang and me. Then we set up JustPod and told the world plainly that we were a “podcast company”.
The industry is still growing. Both the number of shows and the number of listeners have risen significantly over the past eight years. Research firms project that China’s podcast listener growth will lead the world through 2027, and last year the audience passed 150 million. Since the second half of 2025, as in other markets, video podcasts have joined the game.
One thing sets China apart? The video podcast trend here was also driven by local YouTube-like platforms, but when they spotted it, they deliberately chose the word “podcast” (播客) rather than a term an ordinary Chinese viewer would grasp more easily, such as “video talk show”. This is interesting because podcast listeners are only around 10% of China’s population, far below a mature market like the US. Plenty of people in China still don’t quite know what a podcast is, and many have never heard one. Yet the platforms still named the format “video podcast”. I think that owes a lot to the work we and everyone else in this industry have put in. We made “podcast” mean something fresh, young and forward-looking in China, whereas “video talk show” is easy to understand but carries associations with the television era. It is a telling example of where we stand.
What role does JustPod play in China’s podcasting market? What gaps was it looking to fill?
When we started in 2018 there was nothing in front of us, so whichever direction we took, we were filling a gap. Looking back, JustPod was lucky in that we worked out very quickly what we should be doing.
Left-Right launched in February 2018, before JustPod existed as a company. At the time nobody around us, including the audio platforms, believed there was a market for long-form conversation. Douyin, the original TikTok, was already hugely popular, and everyone was convinced short content was the future. But I had been following the American podcast industry closely for years, reading Podnews every day and Hot Pod every week, and I believed that potential would break through in China at some point. We couldn’t say when. We just kept making the show.
Within two months our first client came to us. They were very clear: they wanted a branded podcast of their own, and they wanted to hire us to make it, not buy ads on our show. We realised immediately that branded podcasts had arrived in China much earlier than in the US, and we quickly made branded podcasts, and being a production partner to companies, the core of our business model.
The second discovery came as I got to know the few creators already making podcasts in China. Plenty of people were recording audio, but they did not think of themselves as “podcasters”, and had no sense that this was an industry, that it could be a community, that it could have a future. So in 2019 I founded PodFest China, the country’s first podcast conference, and gathered everyone I knew who was making podcasts so they could see: what I’m doing is podcasting, and I am a podcaster. That brought together the forces that already existed in the market instead of leaving us as one company fighting alone. The success of our shows and the emergence of a community led more people to start podcasts, and prompted local start-ups to build a podcast app suited to Chinese internet habits, which became Xiaoyuzhou (the name means “little cosmos”.
So our role was never just running one company in the market. We believed the ceiling of podcasting was the ceiling of JustPod, and that we couldn’t wait for others to notice the market’s potential; we had to describe that space ourselves. That is why, beyond making shows and producing branded podcasts, we ran PodFest China every year, partnered with NPR to translate their Podcast Start Up Guide into Chinese and bring their producers online for workshops with podcasters in Shanghai, and started writing an industry newsletter in Chinese. None of it made money. But it was essential to getting podcasting recognised as an industry with potential.
Today the industry is far bigger, with far more players, and JustPod is one among many. But on the strength of eight years of work, people still treat us as a bellwether.
You’ve been Europe-based for a few years now and involved with the industry internationally. What can European podcasting learn from China’s market?
The easiest lesson, I think, is to understand clearly what makes your own market distinctive, then use that boldly and inventively to build your own path. That is exactly what we did in China.
My reading of Europe is that traditional radio still carries enormous influence, but at the same time there is a great deal of homegrown innovation. Since moving to the UK I have been to XMTR every year, and I have seen what Jasmin Bauomy is doing with THE ECCO in Berlin. These projects left a deep impression on me, because they show how differently Europe understands audio compared with other markets. European sound makers are treating audio as an inventive form of expression, telling human stories in creative and artistic ways and pushing the medium as far as it can go.
Elsewhere in the world, fewer and fewer people are still doing this kind of exploration. In Europe there are many, and they keep at it. That is what makes Europe distinctive. So what Europe can learn is to recognise that distinctiveness, amplify it, and find its own path.
What do you predict the future of European podcasting will look like?
I have been following European podcasting for far longer than I have lived in Europe. Ten years ago I started reading the radio review columns in British newspapers, Gillian Reynolds, Miranda Sawyer, Fiona Sturges, and envied a media culture that kept a record of podcasts as works, not only as an industry. Later Caroline Crampton’s newsletter PodMail became one of my earliest windows onto European stories that didn’t follow the American script. And of course Lory Martinez of Studio Ochenta, who brought Mija to China with us back in 2020.
If I had to make a prediction, I would point to a recent piece of news: BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts, a year after being cancelled, is relaunching as a co-production with public broadcasters in Australia and Canada. I see a version of European podcasting’s future in that.
First, European audio makers hold on to a commitment to innovation and don’t chase every market trend. Everyone is talking about video podcasts now, and soon they will be talking about AI. That hasn’t stopped many people here from continuing to imagine what sound, as a medium, could still become, rather than deciding what to make based on what everyone else is making. That is rare in the face of enormous change and quick profits.
Second, the way the show came back surprised me. I had imagined, though I never wrote the email to Eleanor McDowall, that Britain might build a network of audio documentary lovers to keep it alive. Their solution was more inventive than mine: they stepped outside the region and joined forces with like-minded people internationally.
That is the future I see for European podcasting. Regional in character, in its insistence on imagining what this medium can do, and global in outlook, connected to kindred spirits around the world. Diversity, imagination and creativity will be its driving forces. And I am glad to now be part of it.
Share a couple of your favorite Chinese podcast recommendations with us.
Flower on the Rock (岩中花述): For the past two years this has been the number one podcast in China, with over 4.4 million followers on Xiaoyuzhou, the local podcast app. It is worth recommending on that basis alone, as a snapshot of where Chinese podcasting is right now, but three things about it deserve a closer look. First, every guest is a woman, and so is most of the audience. To my mind, women’s participation in the medium is the most striking difference between the Chinese market and the US or other Western markets. Since 2020, when Chinese podcasting entered a period of steady growth, female listeners, female podcasters and feminist topics have become a defining feature of the medium here. Second, it is a branded podcast, owned by the luxury womenswear brand GIADA and produced by JustPod. Branded podcasts are not unusual on China’s charts. That has a lot to do with the strategy we have pushed with brands over the past few years: a podcast is not a long advert, you have to make a good show. Third, the host, Chen Luyu, is often called China’s Oprah. Over the past two years more and more celebrities have moved into podcasting, and that carries particular weight in China. Until then, podcasting was a hobby that circulated within certain circles. Celebrities brought it to a much wider public, and the audience grew with them.
Left-Right (忽左忽右): This culture-focused interview podcast was founded in 2018. At a time when Chinese podcasting was full of “garage chat”, it showed another possibility: that a magazine editorial room’s sense of planning, and in-depth interviews, could exist in this new medium. I say this not because I am one of its founding hosts, but because for eight years my partner Cheng Yanliang has made sure every episode holds to the same standard, and every time you listen you come away knowing something you didn’t. There is the long-running and hugely popular espionage series, which takes listeners through the hidden histories of intelligence agencies around the world; there are journalists just back from Ukraine describing the drone war they saw. I also appear regularly to talk about media history. It is a show that has never let its listeners down.
Go Live (去现场): This is a podcast about the media, inspired by Longform and WNYC’s On the Media. I founded it in 2019 and have hosted it since. In the Chinese podcast world, I think it represents the space and the possibilities for niche shows. It has around 100,000 followers across Xiaoyuzhou and Apple Podcasts, a mix of working journalists and journalism students. The show interviews reporters, editors and nonfiction writers about their careers and their craft. It also does what Ankler Agenda or Mixed Signals do, picking up an emerging trend in global media or the influencer world, or going back into media history for lessons and perspective on the present. There are many shows like Go Live in Chinese podcasting, focused on one vertical and building a loyal audience, which is rare and valuable in a world of algorithms and short video. Since 2024 I have run a membership programme on Supporting Cast, the first of its kind in the Chinese-language world, which also says something about the diversity of monetisation and audience engagement being explored here.
Thank you, Yi!
Fascinating interview. The detail that stayed with me is that JustPod started writing an industry newsletter in Chinese that made no money — but it was essential infrastructure for the whole market. That's the audience-first playbook in one sentence: build the direct relationship before you need the revenue. The podcast-native version of that lesson is that owning your listeners' email isn't the same as becoming a newsletter writer. That's the exact gap we built PodSubs (https://podsubs.com) for — email capture for podcasters only, no publishing cadence required.