This year Sounds Profitable is sponsoring the Little Black Book Beach at Cannes Lions. For all those attending, we have a free custom graphic generator live to help folks announce where they’ll be hanging out June 22-26. Just upload a headshot, plug in your details, and you’ll get a socials-ready graphic in seconds. Also: Sounds Profitable partner companies will receive up to three tickets to access the LBB Beach all week, get in touch for more details!
Recapping The Podcast Show London 2026
It was a busy week in London at The Podcast Show 2026. Here’s a quick rundown of stories from in and around the event. Sounds Profitable and Sound Insights debuted The Advertising Landscape U.K. Alexandra Forsyth has a new PodcastingToday opinion piece this week covering the event. The Podcast Standards Project gathered over 20 people together for an annual meetup, and has a blog covering topics discussed. Analyst Adam Bowie has shared his slide deck and key takeaways from his presentation Signals in the Static: A Data-Driven Guide to the Podcast Landscape. Rounding out the data section, Inside Audio Marketing covered Magellan AI’s big PSL debut of the new report Podcast advertising market trends: H1 2026.
Sport Social Podcast Network has an in-depth piece covering the panel Podcasting Beyond Audio and Video: Unlocking the Full Ecosystem, hosted by SSPN Head of Agency Sales Chloe Yates. Elsewhere in the world of panel coverage: Amplifi Media founder Steven Goldstein shares conversation topics and takeaways from a panel he moderated at PSL, with panelists Tom Webster, Dan Misener, and Christiana Brenton. Acast CEO Greg Glenday shared his keynote speech on the official Acast blog.
Moving on to event coverage, last week’s episode of Podnews Weekly Review was recorded live on stage during the conference. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the U.K. the Audio Academy announced the 2026 ARIAS winners, and YouTube announced a curated podcast homepage for the U.K.
Radio, Podcasting, and The Portuguese Man o’ War by Tom Webster
In this week’s Sounds Profitable newsletter, a slide of data from The Podcast Advertising Landscape 2025 shows the Venn diagram overlap of AM/FM Primes and Podcast Primes. In Advertising Landscape terminology, a Prime is someone who uses a media channel every day and ranks it among their top four or five ad-supported media choices on a typical day. In that Venn diagram, AM/FM radio Primes and Podcast Primes only have 1.4% overlap.
It’s easy to see the lack of overlap and presume radio and podcasting are in competition. Webster argues this zero-sum framing runs counter to what the Prime data suggests.
“Radio has spent the better part of fifteen years shedding its 18–34 audience. This isn’t a content failure. It’s the predictable consequence of consolidation-era decisions: format standardization, cost reduction, safe-playlist programming calibrated to hold the audiences radio already had. Anyone who watches radio ratings knows this. The result is that radio’s most engaged listeners skew older, and radio’s most compelling advertising story increasingly lives in the 55+ market. I also live in this market, so it’s not a bad place to live, but we still have some work to do with agencies and brands on that score.”
The data shows similar, but separate audiences for similar but separate media. Webster recalls the Portuguese Man o’ War, which looks like a simple jellyfish but is actually several organisms working symbiotically. “Audio” is not just one catch-all category. Radio and podcasting look similar, but buying both channels creates a stronger symbiotic combined asset.
The Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting (AMP) is a task force of industry leaders from podcast platforms, advertisers, publishers and creators built to future-proof podcasting and address the industry’s measurement challenges. Formed in July 2025, the task force includes executives from Oxford Road, Spotify, BetterHelp, DraftKings, FlightStory, Libsyn, SiriusXM Media, United Talent Agency, and Podscribe. A quote from Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger:
“The podcast marketplace trades on artificial CPMs because exposure metrics change between platforms. Advertisers run multiple attribution systems because media players won’t align on how to measure ad response. We can’t even agree on a shared definition of a podcast. A billion dollars of demand is sitting on the sidelines because of it, and every month we wait is a month the medium loses ground that it doesn’t have to lose. AMP exists because twelve operators agreed to stop waiting”
AMP’s three focus areas are standardizing impression metrics, developing cross-platform performance measurement, and defining the term “podcast” with a universal classification that informs industry sizing, buying, selling, and measurement. AMP will introduce a comprehensive measurement and attribution framework at Oxford Road’s CAO Summit on July 22-23 at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Prime Time is Podcast Time: Smart TVs and Podcasts in the U.K. by Paul Riismandel
The new Signal Hill Insights Pulse Report, Podcasts in the Living Room U.K., conducted with FlightStory, finds that 45% of monthly podcast consumers in the U.K. have used a smart TV to listen to podcasts in the past month. Just 27% used a smart speaker.
Smart TVs are now the second most-used device for podcast consumption in the U.K., ahead of computers at 44%. 54% of video podcast viewers are consuming their podcasts during prime time (7-11 p.m.), outpacing the afternoon commute (4-7 p.m.) at 31%. Taken together, Riismandel says the data suggest video podcasting is becoming more popular as living-room viewing in the U.K. and increasingly resembles prime-time television content for those users. Though, the growth of video should not scare podcasting’s audio-forward base. A quote from Riismandel’s conclusion:
“Smart TVs are an opportunity for podcasts. As one of the least expensive and easy-to-use smart devices in the home, the smart TV makes podcasts even more accessible to more members of the household. With a nearly ubiquitous place in shared spaces – living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, dens and the like – the device also encourages co-viewing and co-listening. But it bears repeating: video podcasts on smart TVs are not cannibalising audio podcast listening. They’re growing podcasting’s share of audience time by replacing other video consumption.”
As for the rest of the news…
- Subscription platform Supporting Cast has become the first to launch gated, subscriber-only video content on Spotify using Spotify’s Distribution API.
- Goalhanger has launched Goalhanger Ventures, a new investment and partnership arm that will back “high-quality, creator-led media businesses with potential across video, social, audio, live and commercial platforms.”
- Self-help podcaster Jay Shetty has signed a deal to bring the video version of his show On Purpose exclusively to Spotify and Netflix starting July 13. Ashley Carman’s sources say the deal is worth as much as $100 million over multiple years.
- The YouTube Team blog has published a new post explaining changes to labels for AI-generated content. Long-form YouTube videos will label photorealistic and meaningfully AI-altered or generated content directly below the video player, while Shorts will overlay the label on the video itself.
