“A return to strong growth” — IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report by Brad Hill
Rain News covers the new IAB report covering ad revenue in 2024. According to the data from PwC and the IAB, last year the digital advertising industry overall reached $259 billion, a 15% year-over-year increase from 2023. Zooming in on podcasting, growth continues to be the trend. Podcast ad revenue increased to $2.4 billion last year, a 26% year-over-year increase (and a healthy jump compared to the 5% increase from 2022 to 2023). While the growth is great, it did have help from a one-two punch of cyclical events (namely the Olympics and US presidential election), and the IAB cautious there likely will be some momentum lost this year due to uneasiness over how tariffs will impact advertising revenue. The full IAB report is available for free in full here.
Coverage of The Advertising Landscape (Multiple Sources)
Last week we published Sounds Profitable’s latest flagship study, with part one of The Advertising Landscape focusing on podcast advertising’s capabilities for Reach. Cameron Coats at RadioInk focused on podcasting and radio’s spoken word shared DNA, with podcasting acting as a gateway to spoken word content that brings more Gen Z audiences into the fold that might then graduate to AM/FM radio usage. Meanwhile Garrett Searight focused on Tom Webster’s message to the wider podcast industry that it’s time to sing the praises of how good podcast advertising is. He recalls when cable TV debuted in America, the industry spent a significant amount of money on promo campaigns that extolled the advertising virtues of cable, on what it could do better than other mediums. Podcasting has yet to do that as a unified voice.
Podcasts Want Their Own Version of the Oscars. Could It Be Any of These? by Reggie Ugwu
A look at the current podcast awards scene via a profile of podcast producer Jason Hoch. According to Hoch, he budgets around $2,000 to $3,000 per year (before travel costs) to submit podcasts to awards juries. As in all forms of media, podcast awards walk a fine line balancing being a worthwhile investment of time/funds for submitters, and being exclusive enough to impart prestige to winners and meet expectations. For instance, Ronald Young Jr.’s excitement at Weight For It receiving three Signal awards was tempered by finding out there’s no formal awards ceremony distributing the awards.
Netflix Sees Potential For Video Podcasts, More Creator Content on Platform by Caitlin Huston
During Netflix’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is constantly looking to other forms of content and content creators to feature on Netflix. To an analyst’s question about video podcasts, he responded “as the popularity of video podcasts grow, I suspect you’ll see some of them find their way to Netflix.” A logical move, given the growth of both of video podcasting specifically, and the general open-ness of streamers to accepting content creator video on their platforms. YouTubers have been able to upload videos to Amazon Prime at will for quite a while. Quite a few successful video game personalities have FAST (free ad-supported streaming) channels on services like Roku, re-distributing their YouTube and podcast content to the wider video ecosystem. This wider context, combined with Netflix’s open embrace of audio podcasting as a supplemental marketing strategy for their own content, suggests Sarandos’ tease will come to fruition sooner rather than later.
Spotify and Video star in Coleman/Amplifi research & webinar by Brad Hill
The first of a two-part coverage of From Explosion to Evolution: The State of Video Podcasting. Hill covers both the new report, and the debut webinar hosted by Jay Nachlis and Steve Goldstein. The report finds the barrier of what ‘counts’ as a podcast continues to become more permeable, with a 2023 version finding 75% of respondents agreed a “podcast” can be audio-only or video. In the March 2025 version of the survey, that number has risen to 85%. Methods of consumption skew slightly in favor of video when filtered for age. Comparing Gen Z respondents to the overall pool, 30% of Gen Z mostly consume podcasts via video, while the overall population clocked in 22%. This article is part one of overall coverage of the report, and part 2 focusing on Creator details can be found here.
As for the rest of the news…
- A new post on the Quill blog looks at the “subtle branding in branded podcasts,” highlighting what has worked for successful business podcasts and how they benefit brands.
- On the subject of selling podcasting’s capabilities, Right Side Up has run an ad on the Crooked network. The source link will take you to that ad on an episode of Pod Save America, isolated in Podscribe.
- Supporting Cast has a new piece explaining how their platform helps creators manage subscriber churn, including six actionable strategies.
- Forbes has a video interview with Diary of a CEO founder Steven Bartlett about his podcasting career, including his rejecting a $100m deal to build his podcast company FlightStory on his own terms
