While podcasts have been around for more than a decade, with the emergence of smartphones, streaming services and virtual home assistants (aka Amazon, Alexa), podcasts have only recently become part of our daily routine. In fact, Apple downloads surpassed 50 billion last year alone!

With over half a million podcasts available in close to 100 languages, this genre of social media is growing daily. I took a step back to figure out what all the hype is about and came up with the following three takeaways: