What a week! It seems just as I fly back from On Air Fest, other Sounds Profitable folks are packing for SXSW. It’s a busy time in the business of podcasting, let’s look at what happened this week.

The News Podcast Consumer from Sounds Profitable and NPR

This Wednesday from Tom Webster at Sounds Profitable: a new report sponsored by NPR has debuted in the Sounds Profitable Educational Series. The News Podcast Consumer is built from data collected for The Podcast Landscape, the industry’s largest publicly-available survey of podcasting with 5,071 Americans aged 18+.

News continues to ride high, ranking the second-most-consumed genre in podcasting among respondents with 31% consuming at least one news podcast in the past month. The demographic breakdown shows News fans tend to be affluent, highly educated, and are more likely to business decision-makers than non-news consumers. 74% of news-fans listen weekly, and they prove to be evangelists for podcasts.

Chief among the evidence of that evangelism is their propensity for co-listening. 67% of non-News consumers rarely or never co-listen to podcasts with other people. For News consumers that drops to 56%, with 30% of respondents occasionally co-listening and 14% co-listening at least most of the time. News listeners trend younger than the general podcast listener, and are highly likely to be commuters. All of which makes News consumers a kind of “force multiplier” for podcasting as they’re both passionate about the content and sharing it around.

Looking Back at On Air Fest 2025

This Wednesday from Gavin Gaddis at Sounds Profitable: last week work x work’s ninth On Air Fest took place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bringing together all walks of podcasting. Gaddis covered the event while also interviewing Sounds Profitable partners using a uniform set of questions to collect opinions about why brands should care about podcasting.

Things kicked off with a keynote panel in the newly-added XXV space, featuring an interview with independent journalist Taylor Lorenz discussing the creator economy and her experience since going fully independent. A quote from Gaddis:

“Looking at the Lorenz panel through a business-of-podcasting lens: it has never been more viable for journalists to build their own brand outside of whatever outlet they work for. Which means they’re all the more available to put the leg work in on outlet-agnostic investigative podcasts that’ll be in need of sponsors and producers.”

Sessions throughout On Air Fest were packed to the brim with creatives and business-of-podcasting folks alike. From a main hall discussion of a woman racing a horse, to an intimate cinema conversation about investigative journalists covering their own families, every session Gaddis poked their head into at least reached standing room, if not outright getting closed up due to maximum capacity. A quote from the article:

“On Air Fest has carved out a place for creative leadership to gather every year, a place to gather and take stock of where we’re at while making valuable new connections. Podcasting’s doing great. Advertisers love us. Video is doing gangbusters. The industry is full of passionate, collaborative people looking to make as many podcasts as the world will watch or listen to. The key will be harnessing that passion, and demonstrating to brands outside the world of podcasting we’re here and more than ready to work.”

Podcasting’s Solutions for Subscriber Churn

This Wednesday from Sara Guaglione at Digiday: During last week’s On Air Fest sessions, several different corners of podcasting addressed how they’re handling subscriber churn now that premium subscriptions are such a core part of podcasting. One anonymous exec said during a breakout session about churn that their company is pushing internal self-promotion, having podcasts promote other podcasts within the company’s umbrella to ensure audience cross-pollination. A quote from the article:

“Steve Ackerman, evp and head of global podcasts at Sony Music Entertainment, said during the session that Sony Music rebranded its true crime podcast bundle subscription offering, “The Binge,” last fall, in part to reduce churn. The idea was to make it clearer to subscribers all of the content they were getting with the bundle, so that when they subscribed to listen to one podcast they were aware of the other shows now available to them. “The Binge” releases a new series every month.”

One tactic used by Supporting Cast that can regain churned subscribers is to automatically turn an expired ad-free subscription feed into a free ad-supported feed that regularly drops mini-episodes that feature the host encouraging lapsed subscribers to rejoin for subscriber-only benefits, sometimes offering a discount as incentive. There’s also the move to make subscription platforms have a free option to act as a one-stop-shop that will eventually drive free members to subscribe due to FOMO, such as Patreon’s launch of free following back in 2023 that now can be leveraged with the Autopilot tool to automatically ID potential subscribers and emails them with discounted first-month offers.

This Week in YouTube

Quite a few new developments at the big red play button! First up, from Ashley Carman last Thursday on Bloomberg, YouTube is planning on adding a cheaper ad-free version of their paid video service. While the $13.99/month YouTube Premium subscription will continue to offer a simple ad-free experience across the entire YouTube ecosystem, the planned “premium lite” tier will cost less and offer an ad-free experience on YouTube uploads that aren’t classified as music videos.

On Wednesday Tim Katz, vice president of partnerships, podcasts at YouTube published an official blog announcing the platform has reached 1 billion monthly podcast users.

The continued expansion of podcasting beyond RSS has introduced several analytical terms that mean different things in different spaces. The same terms are used with different definitions and expectations between mediums. We celebrate the success of Podcasting on YouTube and now have further prioritized our efforts with our partners to rethink and define how we encompass this wider data set to prevent confusion in both within podcasting and the wider world

Finally, covered this Wednesday by the Streaming Wars staff, midroll ad placement is getting a refresh. Starting May 12th, YouTube will reduce the number of midrolls run at disruptive moments (e.g. mid-sentence or during an action sequence), pivoting to a system that aims to target pauses and transition moments. This update will retroactively adjust automatic midrolls placed in videos uploaded before February 24th. YouTube Studio also will give creators feedback on whether their manually placed midroll ad marker placement could be optimized to be less disruptive. An update that likely will improve midroll experience in video podcasts, cutting down on the instances of an ad cutting off a host mid-sentence.

An Australian Audio Roundup

A lot has happened in the Australian audio scene this past week so we’re rounding it all up in one mega-story. First up: on Monday the staff at B&T covered ARN’s iHeart and Magellan AI’s quarterly report on the top 15 Australian podcast advertisers. The leaderboard includes names like Squarespace, Shopify, Toyota, Woolworths, McDonald’s, and in the top spot sits Airbnb. The report also bestows the Australian Agency of the Quarter Award to the agency that spent the most in the Australian podcast industry tracked by Magellan AI. This time around, Q4’s award goes to EssenceMediacom Australia (Sydney).

And audio advertising continues to grow in the country, with broadcaster ARN Media reporting a 9% increase in revenue, reaching $365.6 million AUD for 2024. Southern Cross Austero (SCA) also reports strong performance, clocking 5.3% overall revenue lift year over year. IAB Australia has published their Q4 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which finds audio advertising grew 17.8% in the country last year and reached $313 million AUD. In addition, IAB Australia has also published a new Audio Buyers Guide, which includes a crash course in podcasting terminology and data backing up its growing popularity.

Quick Hits

Finally, it’s time for our Quick Hits. These are articles that didn’t quite make the cut for today’s episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week: 

• Amplitude Media Partners (AMP) is looking to represent more independent creators across podcasting and YouTube, with a specific (but not limited) interest in tech, business and finance.
• Wondercraft launches “Remix” to help fix your existing audio ads An animated debut of the Remix tool, which gives creative teams the ability to have granular control over audio they don’t have stems for by using AI to re-create the stems.
• How Podcasting Reaches $5 Billion by Steven Goldstein A conversation with Cumulus Media Chief Insights Officer Pierre Bouvard about how podcasting can reach the next earnings milestone.
• Why BBC Podcasts Are Moving to Its Website and App Outside the U.K. By Georg Szalai In a move to bring more BBC Studios content worldwide, BBC.com and the BBC app now have a section of curated audio content chosen specifically for global audiences.
• Podcast Business Journal: Rockie Thomas An interview with the Chief Stategy Officer at SoundStack
• Marketing Briefing: Inside the evolution of celebrity brand partnerships by Kristina Monllos As the standard celebrity endorsement fades from the spotlight, agencies are focusing more on authenticity in their celebrity-driven campaigns (excellent news for podcasting, as authenticity is our thing).