Don’t forget! A week from tomorrow (June 26th at 2:00 p.m. EST, to be exact) Sounds Profitable and SiriusXM Media / SiriusXM Podcast Network are hosting Unlock the Power of Purpose-Driven Podcasting: A webinar focused on two of podcasting’s fastest-growing audiences: consumers of Health & Fitness, and Self-Improvement.
Based on new data from The Podcast Landscape, the presentation will explore what motivates these audiences, how they discover and engage with new shows, and what makes them uniquely receptive to branded content and advertising. Registration is free and open now.
The Live Connection: Why Podcasts Need to Get Off the Internet and Into the Room by Tom Webster
With the rising tide of AI-generated content crowding out genuine human-made content and connection, podcasting finds itself in a – as Webster succinctly puts it – authenticity arms race. While the concept of a podcast live show isn’t new, their power is growing with the industry. Lest we forget: Dropout’s Dimension 20 has put on sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl this year. Beyond the appeal of solidifying audience connections, live events also represent an under-used source of revenue streams. VIP experiences, meet-and-greets, branded lounge spaces, networking cocktail hours, experiential marketing adds a lot of value on top of pure ticket sales. Opportunities like major partnerships, book deals, or consulting contracts all can happen because of relationships forged (and abilities demonstrated) during live podcast events.
Cannes Briefing: As the line between brand and studio blurs, creators hold the pen
Digiday’s eyes and ears on the ground at Cannes Lions are finding a running theme of this year’s events is that of brands going beyond the usual dabbling in entertainment into formally investing in it. For example, Dentsu announced a global focus on sports and entertainment from their beach cabana. There’s also a shift towards marketers caring about the creative side of businesses in addition to the traditional sales relationships. Formats have taken a backseat to overall content slates and marketers now care who a particular publisher has attached to projects. Creators are now actively part of deal-making conversations, even when not physically in the room themselves.
De-risk your podcast business by Jonas Woost
Diversification is the name of the game, as Woost lays out some potential futures for the podcasting industry where a podcast business that exclusively uses downloads as their money-making metric is left in a lurch. Even without Woost’s worst-case scenarios (e.g. a world where Apple disables auto-downloads, or Spotify disabling their passthrough arrangement that generates downloads for podcasts on third-party hosts), downloads are becoming less important as more and more podcasts are consumed on streaming and video platforms. It’s prudent to future-proof against industry shifts over time, though at the end of the day downloads are what we have to work with now. Woost details several actionable ways to incorporate existing data and strengthen contracts based on audience consumption metrics.
EXCLUSIVE: Amazon Doubles Prime Video Ads to 6 Minutes Per Hour by Mark Stenberg
According to six ad buyers interviewed by ADWEEK, Amazon has been turning up the amount of ads-per-hour on Prime Video inventory. Back in January 2024 when ads first launched the streamer was reportedly keeping ads between two and 3.5 minutes per hour of content. The sources say this has been gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour (or 6.6% to 10% ad load). For comparison, we looked back to Podscribe and Oxford Road’s The Danger of Rising PodLoad report from earlier this year, which found the average ad load of the top 50 podcasts on Apple Podcasts in Q2 of 2024 was 10.2% (just over six minutes per hour).
Ads & Advocacy: High-Impact Marketing for Budget-Conscious Nonprofits by Anna Minnes
Slate continues their nonprofit marketing series exploring research-backed strategies and trends to help nonprofits maximize campaign impact. Chief among the latest batch is simple show, don’t tell. As Nielsen’s 2023 Consumer Survey showed, brands that create relevant and valuable content for consumers have a higher chance (63% with Nielsen’s data specifically) of leaving them more likely to make a purchase. With Sounds Profitable’s 2024 report Ad Nauseum, 57% of podcast consumer respondents say they’re more tolerant of ads that buck traditional formats. Interactivity, host engagement, and creativity can make an ad stand out and more likely to convert.
As for the rest of the news…
- Fairing has announced a new partnership and integration with Podscribe that unifies attribution data from multiple sources (e.g. survey responses, pixel tracking, promo code performance) into one dashboard.
- The June 2025 Podcast Ranker for Australian podcasting, produced by CRA and Triton Digital, is live and finds the top four from May have held strong with The Mel Robbins Podcast still topping the chart.
- ADWEEK covers the latest edition of Nielsen’s The Gauge streaming ratings, including the landmark finding that May 2025 is the first time Nielsen’s metrics show streaming content was consumed more than the linear segments of broadcast and cable TV combined.
- PodcastOne, having been in partnership with A+E Networks since 2017, has announced renewal of exclusive rights and distribution agreements for five A+E podcasts (including the official Ancient Aliens podcast).
- Reese Witherspoon is bringing her monthly book club to podcasting with Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club, hosted by journalist Danielle Robay and co-produced/distributed by iHeartPodcasts.
- Mashable covers a new discovery that Google is experimenting with using Audio Overviews in search results for Google searches for more nuanced topics, in which Gemini uses Notebook LLM to generate a brief podcast-style conversation between two synthetic voices about the topic of the search.
