A new report from Sounds Profitable and Sound Insights surveyed 5,033 U.K. adults using the same methodology as the 2025 U.S. Advertising Landscape, creating a rare apples-to-apples comparison of the two markets.
43% of British adults listen to ad-supported podcasts monthly. Of those listeners, 56% listen daily or almost daily. A quote from Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster in the official release:
“For any media buyers who have thought of podcasts as a supplementary channel, this report will challenge every plan you’ve written for this year. It’s undeniable that podcasting has reached mainstream with UK audiences. With more than half of monthly listeners saying they tune into podcasts on a near daily basis, that proves they are bringing their favorite shows along with them in their regular routines.”
79% of U.K. podcast listeners recall hearing a podcast ad in the past week. Among that 79%, attention is nearly equal by gender (79% male, 80% female), matching what the U.S. version of The Advertising Landscape found in 2025. As Sound Insights founder Ben Robins noted in a recent Sounds Profitable article, this gender parity on both sides of the Atlantic shows it’s not just a quirk of U.K. podcast consumers — it’s structural to podcasting overall.
The Global Podcast Economy Is Worth $9.2B, Video Is Changing The Picture by Hernan Lopez
Owl & Co’s Global Podcast Economy Report finds the global podcast economy generated $9.2 billion in revenue in 2025, a 23% increase from 2024. A quote from Lopez’s article:
“Video is changing the picture. We built the report from over 300,000 data points across 1,600+ publishers, and spoke with more than 100 podcast publishers and experts around the world. The same pattern kept surfacing: publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest. (We didn’t get into the cost side, however: as we covered extensively since last year, getting video ‘right’ can be expensive, and the bar keeps rising).
Direct advertising revenue remains the leading source of revenue year over year. Consumer revenue grew 22%, with Patreon leading as the biggest platform.
The Podnews Report Card 2026 Results by James Cridland
Each year, Podnews solicits feedback from podcast creators and producers about podcast platforms. This year’s report card hit a new high with over 160 podcast creators. In all, respondents provided 779 pieces of qualitative feedback, including 290 mentions of Apple, 251 of Spotify, and 207 of YouTube.
Respondents said it is easier to get podcasts listed in major directories than it was several years ago, though U.S.-based respondents said ID verification remains a pain point when setting up a podcast on YouTube. Overall, though, YouTube is framed as a positive force for the industry, even scoring second place in the overall ranking of the top four platforms (above Spotify, below Apple Podcasts).
Digital audio in the US is already worth Brazil’s entire digital ad market by Rodrigo Tigre
Ozen.fm co-founder and president Rodrigo Tigre writes about Brazil’s underdeveloped podcast advertising market. A quote from the article:
“To put it in perspective: at current exchange rates, US digital audio alone – just audio, no video, no search, nothing else, in 2025 practically generated the same amount as Brazil’s entire digital advertising market for the year. Yes, the category that doesn’t even have its own line in the reports here in the US, is worth Brazil’s entire pie.”
Tigre identifies three causes for the spending gap in Brazilian audio that the industry has now matured enough to overcome: a fragmented digital audio space, the myth that audio can’t be measured, and cultural roadblocks of a healthy, but fragmented, radio scene.
With modern tech, audio is measurable and available in ways that let brands without previous audio budgets achieve national reach. Brands investing in Brazil’s audio scene likely will find themselves big fish in quiet ponds, with little in the way of competition for attention or feed saturation. As measurement matures and digital audio scales, Tigre sees Brazil’s digital audio market as one of the “last blue oceans in marketing.”
As for the rest of the news…
- Video-first podcast hosting, distribution, and analytics platform Flightcast has launched support for video on Apple Podcasts and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video publishing.
- Spotify has expanded its Verified by Spotify badge system to include podcasts, indicating a show is the official presence of a creator, publisher, or brand.
- Global has launched the ability to direct-sell advertising across its YouTube content network.
- YouTube has announced it will roll out their deepfake-fighting likeness detection tech for all “eligible creators over the age of 18.”
- Amplifi Media founder Steven Goldstein shares takeaways from his NYU Business of Podcasting class, in which students listened to and critiqued AI-generated podcasts about topics that interested them.
