Mark your calendars: Thursday, April 16, and 1:00 p.m. EST Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster and RSS.com co-founder Alberto Betella will present Audio Primes: The People Who Listen to Podcasts. This new report, built from The Podcast Landscape 2025 data, focuses on Audio Primes, people who listen to at least 75% of their content as audio. Registration is open, grab your virtual seat now.
Something shifted in London for me at the end of March.
On the heels of the beast that was the first Podcast Movement Evolutions at SXSW, the Sounds Profitable team stomached long TSA lines again and crossed the Atlantic for another first: Advertising Week Europe.
16 panels. Two days. Nearly 450 unique attendees.
By most measures, our Business of Podcasting space was a success and something we’re excited to continue building in the years to come. But what stuck with me most actually wasn’t the attendance figure.
It was what people told us when they walked in the door.
They weren’t there because Sounds Profitable was hosting or even because they knew someone speaking. They were there because the room was talking about podcasting.
That’s a signal worth paying attention to.
For years, podcasting operated in a kind of productive silo. We built great things, argued about attribution, celebrated our wins, and largely talked to ourselves. It was a lot of fun. But, the industry’s biggest conversations happened at podcast-specific events, in podcast-specific publications, among people who were already convinced. That was fine. Maybe even necessary for a medium still proving itself.
But podcasting has proven itself. According to our Podcast Landscape 2025, 55% of Americans consumed a podcast in the past month. That’s not a niche. That’s mainstream media. That’s a call for bigger rooms to conquer.
The other number I keep coming back to is what we at Sounds Profitable call The Last Quarter. This is the approximately 25% of American adults who say they have never consumed a podcast.
While it might be tempting to write them off and focus on the larger 75% of the pie, we don’t.
Why spin our wheels over a quarter of the market that’s not engaged?
Because when you look at the data, these aren’t people who tried podcasting and walked away. They haven’t rejected us. They haven’t been invited in. There’s a meaningful difference between a closed door and a door that was never opened.
Advertising Week Europe felt like evidence that the door is ready to be opened globally. And it was reminiscent of what we’d seen less than two weeks before in Austin. These events in tandem proved that when you put podcasting in an environment that wasn’t built exclusively for podcasting, something different happens. The conversations change because the people who show up for them change.
The professionals who filled the room included brand strategists, media buyers, agency leads and more. None of them were there out of obligation. They were curious. They were asking real questions. The interest was genuine, and it wasn’t coming from people already inside the podcasting ecosystem.
That’s new. And it matters.
This is what Sounds Profitable was built to do: bring podcasting into spaces bigger than podcasting. Not to extract value from those rooms, but to raise the profile of the entire industry so that the writers, hosts, producers, advertisers, agencies, sales teams, ad ops teams, and companies doing serious work in this space get the recognition, the investment, and the partnerships they’ve earned.
We’ve been building toward this. SXSW was the first proof point this year, and something clicked in London that made clear we’re on the right track. Later this month, many of our partners will be attending POSSIBLE in Miami to explore deeper conversations around marketing and ad tech. In May, we’re taking podcasting directly into LA’s content creator conversations and attending both the Scalable Summit and The Press Publish Creator Summit.
We’ll also be back in the UK for The Podcast Show London in May because showing up for our industry still matters, even as we push into bigger rooms. Immediately after, we’re expanding further than we ever have at the Cannes Lions Festival with space at LBB Beach, giving our partners direct access to one of the most important stages in global advertising.
The goal is consistent: put podcasting in the room where decisions get made and conversations bigger than podcasting happen. Then, make sure we show up worthy of the moment.
The industry spent a long time being humble about what we’d built. There’s value in that. It kept us honest and kept us focused on the work. But 55% monthly reach doesn’t call for humility. It calls for presence.
The audiences are ready. The buyers are paying attention. The only question is whether podcasting shows up at the scale the medium deserves.
Everything we build, the stages, the panels, the on-demand content, exists to make the entire industry better. The rising tide model only works if more people have access to the conversation. Watch every session from Advertising Week Europe on our YouTube page, and if you want to be in the room where these conversations happen next, reach out to me directly to learn what Sounds Profitable partnership looks like.
