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Spotify Tests One-Tap “Skip Ahead” as the Industry Pushes Back
Podnews editor James Cridland broke news that Spotify is testing “Skip Ahead,” a feature that lets Premium subscribers skip an entire podcast ad break, sponsorship message, or intro segment with a single tap, reducing a skip from nine taps to one. The feature has yet to be formally announced. While there are similarities to YouTube’s Jump Ahead, the way IAB ad delivery is counted means Spotify is not providing hosting platforms with the additional data needed to report attention to advertisers, and its own shows appear not to be excluded from the tool. Premium users never received streaming-served ads to begin with, and on Spotify’s Q3 earnings call co-CEO Alex Norström noted the company is experimenting with increasing the number of ads free users hear to motivate Premium upgrades. As things currently stand, the feature can be used to leverage over-delivering ads as a tool to pester audiences into paying for an ad-free experience, hurting advertisers caught in the middle. A move by Spotify to openly adopt HLS likely could solve major advertiser concerns with this rollout, as well as become a large revenue stream for the company.
The scoop drew a wave of reaction from industry leaders. Crooked Media founder Tommy Vietor did not mince words, opening an X post with “Very cool of Spotify to try and destroy the podcast industry,” as covered in a Mediaite article by Stephanie Kaloi. Krystina Rubino, GM of Offline and Audio at Right Side Up, walked advertisers through what the feature means for host-read campaigns and the sponsorships most exposed when a listener can skip them instantly. ADOPTER Media founder and CEO Glenn Rubenstein published a new blog post arguing that automated editorial decisions about someone else’s content should not be made by a party that had no role in creating it, making the case that host-read ads are part of the show itself rather than a segment to engineer around.
Video on Apple Podcasts: Now Open to All
Acast has opened video publishing on Apple Podcasts to every creator on its platform, removing the invitation and waitlist requirements that had gated the feature during its beta. Shows that added video over the four-month beta saw an estimated 25% increase in weekly sessions on Apple Podcasts, and creators can monetize the video through Acast’s marketplace of more than 4,000 advertisers. Network creators get access through their partner managers, while everyone else can publish via a new Video plan tier that handles upload, distribution, automatic audio extraction, and performance analytics. “Video distribution in podcasting is becoming table stakes. What no one else can offer is the scale of the monetization engine,” said Valerie Reimer, Acast’s SVP of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, who added that “video is an option, not a mandate, and a creator who decides against it is making a legitimate editorial judgment.”
UK Media Coalition Urges Government to Drop BBC Podcast Ad Plans
A coalition of 18 UK media organizations, including Audioboom, Bauer, Global, Guardian Media Group, News UK, Newsquest, Reach, Goalhanger, and Radiocentre, is urging the government to reject proposals that would allow advertising on BBC podcasts and audio content.
The group’s economic analysis argues the BBC would generate only around £10 million a year from podcast ads, roughly 0.25% of the licence fee, while materially harming the independent audio sector that depends on that revenue. The coalition also points to polling showing two in three UK citizens oppose ads on BBC podcast content, and notes a similar proposal was ruled out in 2025. A quote from Radiocentre CEO Matt Payton:
“BBC podcasts should remain ad-free in the UK, however they’re produced or distributed. Pressing ahead with this ill-conceived proposal in face of the evidence would only succeed in damaging home-grown audio businesses, while raising limited additional funds for the BBC. We urge the government to now rule out this proposal which would be deeply unpopular with audiences.”
IAB’s New Advice on How to Measure AI Search Visibility
The IAB has released guidelines for measuring visibility in AI search results, aimed at helping brands and publishers track how they surface in AI-generated answers. The framework centers on web search analytics rather than podcast-specific measurement. It arrives as the industry works toward consistent standards for counting attention across formats, a question increasingly relevant to audio and video publishers.
The framework, titled “Measuring Visibility in the AI Era,” sorts metrics into four categories the IAB calls the 4 P’s: presence, prominence, portrayal, and persuasion, and it separates early directional signals from data reliable enough to guide budget and strategy decisions. That structure lands on a messy field, as more than 20 vendors already sell AI-visibility tools built on different query sets, platform coverage, and scoring methods, to the point that two can measure the same brand in the same week and return materially different results. For publishers, the IAB frames standardized ingestion and disclosure metrics as leverage in licensing conversations, a thread that runs straight into the audio industry’s own push to standardize measurement as podcast discovery increasingly flows through AI-assisted search.
As for the rest of the news…
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Apple published its fiscal Q3 2026 results, with Services revenue, the segment that houses Apple Podcasts, up 12% year over year to $30.7 billion. Podnews also covered SiriusXM Media’s report, where CEO Jennifer Witz said podcast revenue is up 30% year over year.
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A new ekoz report finds US podcast ad spend crossed $3 billion in 2026, with programmatic dynamic insertion now roughly 91% of placements even as host-read ads still command 2x higher CPMs.
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Livewire’s July episode data shows Spotify for Creators rebounded to a 24% share of all podcast episodes released while Spreaker climbed to a 2026 record of 13.6%, meaning nearly every other host slipped for the month.
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Kirby Grines argues the smartest streaming play is licensing mature catalog while keeping current releases exclusive, citing Parrot Analytics data that licensed titles have driven more than half of Netflix’s series sign-ups since Q1 2025, the same exclusivity-versus-reach math now coming for podcast catalogs.
