Webinar vs podcast

Akshay Datt

Founder of Unnati and host of Founder Thesis, a long-form interview podcast with company founders. Over 400 episodes since 2020.

Run a webinar when the quarter needs named leads. Run a podcast when the buyers you need have not started looking yet. An average B2B webinar ends with about 84 attendees, each registered by name and email. A podcast episode ends with an audience you cannot name. The choice is which of those two you are short of.

A webinar is a scheduled online session people register for, usually a presentation or panel with live questions. A podcast is a recorded series published to a feed and to YouTube, which people follow without telling you who they are. Both can be an hour of experts talking. They do opposite jobs.

What is the difference between a webinar and a podcast?

A webinar is an event that collects identities. A podcast is a series that collects attention. Everything else follows from the registration form one has and the other does not.

The table reads as a trade. A webinar gives sales a list by Friday and is forgotten by the following month. A podcast gives sales nothing to call, and keeps working in the feed long after the recording.

How many people attend a B2B webinar?

About a third of the people who register, which on Goldcast’s platform worked out at roughly 84 attendees from 260 registrations per webinar across 2025. A year earlier the same platform’s figures came to 42 attendees from 179 registrations.

Plan the follow-up around the registrant list. Two in three registrants never show, and every one of them still handed over an email address. That list is the product of a webinar, and the hour itself is the price of collecting it.

Do people watch webinar recordings?

Some do, and they watch more of it than the live audience. On-demand viewers finish 91% of a recording on average, against 74% for people who joined live. They are still only about one viewer in six.

That is the shape of an event. Most of the audience a webinar will ever have arrives in a single hour, and the recording is a courtesy to the people who missed it. A podcast runs the other way: an episode has no live hour, so its audience is entirely the people who come to it afterwards.

How many people listen to a B2B podcast?

A few hundred views an episode on YouTube is normal for a podcast a company runs to market something else. The exceptions are shows built by a large brand or by hosts with an existing following.

None of those viewers left a name. A view and a webinar attendee are different units, and what separates them is identity. The audio feed adds listeners on top, counted in downloads by a separate system, and how many downloads is normal is its own question. For the full picture of what video does and does not bring, see video podcast vs audio podcast.

Which generates more leads, a webinar or a podcast?

A webinar, if a lead means a contact record this month. The registration form produces one per registrant, and nothing in podcasting does.

A podcast produces leads a different way. The most valuable person in any episode is the guest, who spent an hour with your host and who is often exactly the senior buyer a sales team cannot get a meeting with. A show that books the people it sells to turns its guest list into its pipeline. The listeners come later, and they arrive saying they heard the show, which is why podcast attribution is measured by asking rather than by tracking. A webinar captures the buyers who are already looking. A podcast gets an hour with the ones who are not.

Which lasts longer, a webinar program or a podcast?

A webinar program can stop any month. Each event stands alone, and nearly one webinar in three now belongs to a series, up from one in four a year before. Missing a month costs that month.

A podcast cannot stop quietly. The feed shows every gap, and B2B company shows that stop tend to do so after about four years, when the cadence slips and the people who started the show move on. The question to answer before launch is whether someone will still be booking guests in year three. If nobody will, the webinar is the honest choice.

Should a B2B company run both?

Yes, once the first one is running on schedule, and with each feeding the other. A podcast guest who gave a sharp hour is a ready-made webinar speaker with an audience of their own. A webinar registrant list shows which topics the market will hand over an email to hear about, and those are the episodes worth booking next.

Running both at once from a standing start splits a small team across two cadences. Start with the one the company is short of, and add the second when the first no longer needs anyone to remember it.

How to choose between a webinar and a podcast

1. Name what sales is missing. Contacts to call this quarter point to a webinar. Meetings with senior people who will not take a cold call point to a podcast.
2. Check who the buyer is. If the buyer is already searching for a product like yours, they will register for a webinar about it. If they are not searching yet, they will not register for anything, and an episode that features their peers is how they meet you.
3. Count the people available to host. A webinar needs a presenter on the day. A podcast needs a host every week for years.
4. Set the benchmark before the first one. About a third of registrants attending, for a webinar. A few hundred views an episode and a guest list worth having, for a podcast. A number written down in advance survives the first quarterly review.

Frequently asked questions