Reminder: Sounds Profitable’s latest research, The Podcast Atlas, will debut tomorrow, July 1, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern in a live webinar hosted by Tom Webster. Registration is free and open now, grab your virtual seat!
Miroma Group Acquires Ad Results Media
Miroma Group has acquired Ad Results Media (ARM), the performance audio advertising agency. ARM CEO Jordan Fox announced the deal on LinkedIn, noting the agency’s growth over the past two years: 26 new client wins, expanded service capabilities, and a rebuilt technology and data infrastructure. The acquisition is positioned as a major U.S. expansion move for Miroma Group, with ARM bringing its podcast-native performance advertising expertise into the broader portfolio.
The Purchase Funnel by Ben Robins
The fourth installment of Robins’ article series looking at the UK Advertising Landscape examines what happens downstream of podcast ad trust: repeated purchasing. Among UK 18-34 podcast listeners, 44% made a purchase after hearing a podcast ad, compared to 29% across all ages, with an average of 1.13 purchases per listener over the past three months. TikTok posts a higher purchase mean at 1.52 but is heavily age-skewed, dropping from 1.71 among 18-34 listeners to 0.84 among 55+; Facebook is the outlier, with a flat conversion rate of roughly 1.1 regardless of age, a product of settled habit rather than growth. Podcasting’s 55+ purchase mean stands at just 0.36, a gap Ben Robins flags as a meaningful opportunity given that demographic’s disproportionate share of discretionary spending. Eighty-seven percent of UK podcast listeners take some action after hearing a podcast ad, with search, conversation, and social channel visits all preceding the purchase.
YouTube Didn’t Take a Cut of Creator Deals. It Took the Scoreboard by Steve Raizes
In this morning’s issue of Media, Built, Steve Raizes examines YouTube’s retirement of BrandConnect (originally acquired as FameBit in 2016) and its replacement with Creator Partnerships, a system built directly into Google Ads infrastructure. Rather than taking a commission on creator deals, YouTube monetizes when brands amplify creator content through Google Ads, capturing ad spend while controlling the discovery, distribution, and measurement layers simultaneously. Creators who share their channel analytics with the platform appear 60% more frequently in advertiser searches, a tradeoff that gains discoverability at the cost of surrendering first-party audience data to YouTube’s proprietary measurement rails. Raizes frames the shift as a structural replay of how traditional media networks built leverage through infrastructure control rather than content ownership, now applied to creator sponsorships at platform scale.
Is HLS video better for consumption stats? by James Cridland
Podnews editor James Cridland examines whether HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) technology improves podcast consumption measurement, and finds that the gains are real but incomplete. HLS streams content in chunks rather than as a single download, theoretically enabling platforms to measure actual listening behavior rather than file delivery, but Cridland’s testing found that browser buffering causes more than 60 seconds of content to pre-download before playback even reaches that point. Definitional fragmentation compounds the problem: Apple counts any playback as a “play,” while Spotify requires 30 seconds. Cridland concludes that HLS provides clearer data than traditional downloads for streaming listeners, but that meaningful measurement improvement ultimately requires consistent instrumentation across all podcast apps, an outcome that remains unlikely given the fragmented ecosystem.
…as for the rest of the news:
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Podcast Movement’s annual NYC conference is accepting speaker submissions through end of day today. Get your submissions in now!
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PodcastOne has published their fiscal year 2026 report. Key figures include revenue of $61 million for FY26 – an 18% increase year over year – with a net loss of $2.6 million.
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Sibling Rivalry, hosted by RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni Bob the Drag Queen and Monét X Change, has signed an exclusive hosting and monetization deal with Libsyn.
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A Headliner survey of 250 podcasters found that adding captions to YouTube video podcasts increases view counts for most respondents, consistent with research showing 85% of video viewers watch on mute.
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Triton Digital CRO Sharon Taylor argues that video podcasting can grow without sacrificing audio’s core value, as the format continues to expand globally.
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Members of the IAB Australia Audio Council joined IAB Australia CEO Gail Eroy in an episode of The IAB Australia Podcast to discuss investment, creative, data, and programmatic buying across streaming audio and podcasting.
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IZEA VP, Creator Strategy & Innovation Lindsey Gamble shares five observations from his first Cannes Lions, including creator investors emerging as a growing story and platforms rewarding longevity over raw reach.
