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Podcasting’s High Trust and Recall, NPR’s Open Letter to Congress, & More

Podcasting’s High Trust and Recall, NPR’s Open Letter to Congress, & More

June 4, 2025

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.

 

Spotify aims to get revenue tune out of 62% non-paying audience via major programmatic performance push by Kaila Welch

 

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…