YouTube sponsorships are up 54% year-over-year. We know because we launched a tool to track them.
Intelligence platform Gospel Stats, founded by the Tubefilter team and the Streamy Awards, has published an inaugural report called the YouTube Sponsorship Landscape. The report tracks sponsorships across tens of millions of YouTube channels, tracking revenue that isn’t counted as official ad revenue by Google. According to their data, 65,759 sponsored videos were uploaded in H1 of this year, representing a 54% year-over-year increase. Viewership for sponsored videos has grown 28% y-o-y. A good chunk of that growth is driven by YouTube’s “middle class” of uploader (those with 100,001 to 500k subscribers).
The Q3 2025 audience report for the BBC’s audio app finds total plays in the UK have increased 8.5% year over year, from 622 million to 675m. Average weekly audience reached 5.1 million users across all of BBC audio (including visualized podcasts), hitting a peak of 5.4 million weekly users in late August.
State of Audio – The Creator Effect
Audacy has a new State of Audio report, this one focusing on the impact creators have with audiences. Trust and parasocial relationships remain a valuable currency with respondents, as an Audacy Power of Influencers study from earlier this year found 69% of respondents value radio for local hosts who share local experiences, and 48% feel happy to support products recommended by their local radio and podcast hosts. 44% of respondents to their Music and Talent Study (2025) feel a stronger connection to a brand when they hear it endorsed by their favorite audio creator.
Sci-fi podcast gets promotion in the cinema
Solar, a star-studded audio fiction podcast with names like Helen Hunt, Alan Cumming, and Stephanie Beatrice, ran an advertising campaign in Maya Cinemas locations that included two trailers in the standard pre-show before every movie screening, as well as ephemera in the lobby. While podcast live shows have been promoted in theaters before (Fathom Events ran a trailer for a Critical Role in-character wedding live show basically all summer), this Solar campaign shows how a podcast can go a step beyond airing an ad next to local car washes and movie trivia in the preshow. QR codes and posters in the lobbies both generate curiosity for people walking in, and capitalizes on the FOMO for people interested in Solar, but didn’t Google the podcast before the movie proper started.
E-commerce sites see low sales from ChatGPT traffic, new study finds by Allison Smith
Smith takes a look at a new working paper from researchers at the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The paper finds that referral traffic to e-commerce sites directed from ChatGPT converts worse than old-school marketing channels like Google search, email, and affiliate marketing. The paper looked at 12 months of first-party data from 973 e-commerce sites, spanning $20 billion in annual revenue. For comparison, ChatGPT referrals landed over 50k transactions, while traditional channels secured 164 million sales. The abstract says the results of their research contradict widespread expectations of LLM referrals being a magic bullet. Even with LLM referrals steadily growing over the 12 month period of the study, the researchers estimate it still won’t reach parity with organic search referrals in 2026. So, if you were sweating all of the potential podcast subscriptions being left on the table by not being scraped/recommended by ChatGPT… there might not be much to stress on that front.
As for the rest of the news…
- On Thursday, November 13th in Brooklyn author Amanda Cupido (Let’s Talk Podcasting), Mia Lobel (Executive Producer, Slate Podcasts) and moderator Jemma Rose Brown (Signal Awards) will host a conversation about partnerships and creative approaches to the modern podcast market. Registration is free, space is limited.
- Nomono has launched an automated transcription service in their Studio Cloud suite that can then be exported as an .srt file or text file.
- Amaze Media Labs has announced the launch of a new feature on their podcast growth platform Audiencelift.com: publisher data transparency. The new feature shows podcasters a detailed list of digital publishers wherever their podcast trailers are advertised.
- The Boston Globe’s Head of Audio Kristin Nelson is on Podcast Perspectives this week to discuss integrating audio into the newsroom.
- Fairing co-founder Matt Bahr celebrates Fairing audience-facing questions having been viewed almost 1 billion times.
- This week MacVoices celebrates its 20th anniversary, along with BackBeat Media having been part of the journey for the majority of the ride. Congrats!
- AudioUK and the PIA have joined forces to launch the International Podcast Alliance, a transnational platform for bringing together organizations representing podcast and audio producers (as well as businesses and publishers) on a global scale.
