How podcasts are earning their spot in the premium ad tier by Alexander Lee
Digiday covers The Advertising Landscape: Trust and Attention, built from a survey of 5,005 Americans aged 18+ conducted in January and February of this year. Key findings from the report Lee covers include frequent podcast listeners remembering ads more than other top consumers of media. When Prime users (those who consume podcasts daily) asked if they had heard or seen an ad on several forms of media in the past week, podcasts with ads top the chart at 86%. Network/cable TV with ads coming second with 82% and AM/FM radio in third with 81%. Trust in podcasts is also high, with ad-supported podcasts coming third at 46% for the question “do you trust the content moderation and quality control of this media channel?” Fourth place is X with 38%, followed by network cable/TV at 33%. For context on that number the highest scoring medium, Twitch, scored 51%. The full report is now available on Sounds Profitable for download, with a recording of Tom Webster’s webinar going over key findings set to be hosted on the same page sometime this evening.
Free users make up two thirds of Spotify’s user base, generating 10% of their revenue. The Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), with integrations into The Trade Desk, Google DV360, and Mognite aim to rectify that as they build out the infrastructure to programmatically serve ads to the free userbase. In closed testing SAX had close to 6,000 advertisers involved, followed by the soft launch that has it on three big DSPs purely for ads running between music tracks, with podcast audiences not yet having been launched. Spotify global head of product and commercial growth Chloe Wix says this staggered release is due to the tricky nature of building automated podcast bidding, as the ads can only run on Spotify-owned or licensed podcasts.
NPR CEO Open Letter to Congress
NPR CEO Katherine Maher has published a statement regarding a recent memo from the White House urging Congress to reverse course and pull funds already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, intended for fiscal year 2026/2027. Were the funds rescinded, a massive amount of public media stations across the country would be impacted. Since 1975 public media has received bipartisan support in Congress. Maher says this move to “save” money by withdrawing already-committed funds is the biggest threat to public media in U.S. history with a stunt that would have negligible impact on the national deficit or taxpayers. All while simultaneously impacting taxpayers by deleting access to local news, national reporting, the arts, and emergency alerting services.
As for the rest of the news…
- Podcast Perspectives from The Podglomerate has published The Making of an Award-Winning Podcast, featuring panel audio from a session at Evolutions by Podcast Movement with Jeff Umbro, Signal Awards General Manager Jemma Rose Brown, and investigative journalist David Sirota.
- Gumball has launched a new AI-driven ad product called Adaptive Ads, which delivers contextually-relevant podcast ad reads on a per-episode basis. Early partners for Adaptive Ads include Audioboom, Backyard Ventures, and QCODE.
- Audacy has announced former Executive Vice President Michael Biemolt is now President of Digital Sales.
- AudioStack has published the finale of their Omnichannel AI Audio for Agencies article series
- Yesterday marked the launch of Veylan, an AI-native full-stack operating system built for advertising.
- Lindsay Patterson has a new episode of The Kids Podcast Podcast about the ABCs and 123s of launching a kid’s podcast.
- Larj Media is hosting Your Podcast, Your First Impact Everywhere next Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. EST, featuring a 45 minute presentation introducing their Podcast First approach, hosted by Larj Media founder Tina Nole.
