What’s Next for Sounds Profitable, by Bryan Barletta
As announced in an Axios article by Kerry Flynn this Monday, Sounds Profitable and Podcast Movement are merging. Both brands will continue to exist with their original staff intact, with Bryan Barletta becoming president of Podcast Movement. In this week’s Sounds Profitable newsletter, Barletta details improvements this merger empowers for both Podcast Movement and Sounds Profitable.
On the Podcast Movement side, Evolutions will be combined with existing Sounds Profitable efforts establishing a Podcast Industry track at SXSW, merging the two instead of Evolutions and SXSW being two separate events industry leaders have to choose between.
Up until now the main Podcast Movement event has rotated between cities like Orlando, Dallas, and Washington, DC on a yearly basis. Starting in September 2026 the conference will become a New York City native. A core motivator for Sounds Profitable’s involvement with live events has been expanding beyond events where podcasting talks to podcasting alone, putting podcasting in front of buyers and brands who haven’t given podcasting a fair shake yet (because if they had, they would be buying podcasts 🙂 ).
New York City is a hub of advertising, a global travel hub, and home to a significant chunk of the podcast industry, making future Podcast Movements easier to attend for the world’s podcast industry.
In addition, Podnews editor James Cridland will be appointed the conference’s first Editorial Director, bringing a renewed focus on supporting the creator side of podcasting. Podcast Movement has always been a business-forward event, but with an Editorial Director overseeing the Creator track and bringing an emphasis on growth, education, and diversity of voices the event can work to regrow creator presence that’s waned since before the pandemic. A quote from Barletta:
“Creators of all sizes are how this industry grows and thrives, from those in front of the mic to those behind, and let’s not forget those building the independent technology and solutions to advocate for this space.”
To the point of education, starting with the very Podcast Movement I’m typing this newsletter at, the Virtual Ticket has been retired. As Barletta says in his newsletter, education and insights should be open and free in a growing market (which podcasting very much still is), not a luxury for those who can afford plane tickets or a virtual ticket. As a result, all panel stages at Podcast Movement 2025 have been upgraded to record audio and video, and all sessions will be made available for free online following the event.
On the Sounds Profitable side, Barletta says we’re doubling down on committing to support and sponsor events/resources that benefit the podcasting community. In the coming weeks SP will foster podcasting’s presence at events like Advertising Week New York, SXSW Sydney, and In Defense of Podcast Journalism – an event for journalists to come together and discuss how podcast journalism can be supported – hosted by the LA Times and Larj Media.
In addition, SP will continue salon-style single-topic events with the support of Dan Frank’s company Event Movement, as well as launching committees and working groups to bring 200+ partner companies together to roll up our collective sleeves and improve the industry.
Podcasting Audiences Value Choice
On Tuesday, during his Podcast Movement keynote speech, Tom Webster debuted some fresh data from the upcoming 2025 edition of The Podcast Landscape, a survey of U.S. respondents familiar with podcasting. In the 2024 edition of the study, one slide shows responses to “When you think of a podcast, do you expect it to be audio or video?” In 2024 26% of respondents said audio only, 21% said “may be either,” and the usually-video or video only responses totaled up 15%. In the 2025 edition, audio-only has dropped to 26%, “may be either” is 21%, and “usually video” and “video-only” are up to 16%. Webster’s read of the audio-only percentage decreasing and largely being absorbed into “may be either” as not a sign that audio is being devalued, but a sign that podcast audiences value choice. Even on YouTube, 47% of respondents say they consume 50% or less of their podcast consumption via watching video. People listen to podcasts on YouTube a lot, something Tom attributes to YouTube having an easy-to-use app, good discoverability, and a culture of per-upload thumbnails that’re better at grabbing immediate attention than generalized show art. The data Tom previewed, as well as the rest of the study, will be debuted in a live webinar on Thursday, September 4th at 2 PM EST.
Every year Signal Hill Insights conducts a survey of 12,000 adult podcast consumers in support of Triton Digital’s Podcast Metrics Demos+. Since the annual study kicked off in 2021, News has consistently remained the second most-consumed podcast category, though Q2 2025 hit a new high with 27.3% of monthly podcast consumers saying they listened to or watched a news podcast in the past month. News podcast consumers trend more affluent, educated, and likely to hold high-level positions at their jobs. They’re also 22% more likely to say they remember hearing a podcast ad for 10 top brands advertising on podcasts.
Triton Digital’s Demos+ data also suggests the political makeup of incoming News podcast consumers has shifted, with more respondents identifying as Republican this year (42%) and a drop-off of Democrat (27%) compared to 2024, which 44% of new News podcast audiences identifying as Democrats and 26% self-identifying as Republican. Though this focuses specifically on newer audiences, as zooming out to those listening to news podcasts for at least five years finds the largest share of political affiliation still leans Democrat. A quote from Riismandel:
“News podcasts are not only finding themselves increasingly at the center of the national conversation, they are appealing to an inquisitive and attractive audience that’s growing even faster than podcast consumption in general. All good reasons for publishers and advertisers to keep a close eye on the category.”
YouTube Growth Continues, Launches Collaborator-Focused Shorts Ads
A new YouGov survey of U.K. social media users finds 28% of respondents use YouTube more than they did a year ago. Instagram scored 25%, TikTok 21%, and X pulled in 15%. Two age brackets stand out for using YouTube more this year: Gen Z (38%) and Baby Boomers (53%). The platform is also rolling out a new tool for Shorts aiming to address a big friction point for content creator-focused campaigns. Partnership Ads, a new format specifically for Shorts, co-brands vertical video ads to be ‘from’ both the creator involved and the brand they’re working with. A content creator might be well-known to their own audience, but unrecognizable if their video is posted by the brand, a recurring problem on shortform video platforms like Shorts and TikTok. Partnership Ads aims to fix that formatting gap so both the brand and the collaborator can benefit from organic growth.
A Billboard article reporting on the numbers for last week’s episode of New Heights, which featured Taylor Swift casually dropping the name and album art for her upcoming 12th studio album. The YouTube version of the episode clocked 9 million views in 12 hours, while Spotify reports a 2,500% increase in average streams and a female listeners spiking 618%. Podnews editor James Cridland says this moment marks a missed opportunity for podcasting, and I concur. For better or worse, our industry does not have a habit of major platforms sharing public-facing engagement stats. Which means whenever a Swiftie-sized moment comes along podcasting is left out in the cold while video platforms get the lion’s share of coverage by journalists. Podcasting has statistics, plenty of them, but most are not public-facing in the way watch stats are on video platforms. And if a reporter covering a hot cultural moment doesn’t have a specific background in podcasting, they likely don’t know who to email at what company to get juicy numbers to flesh out a story about a podcast.
Finally, it’s time for my Quick Hits. These are articles that didn’t quite make the cut for today’s episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:
- SiriusXM Media has a quick survey for folks working in the podcasting industry, asking their opinion on big topics impacting the industry (I’ve taken it, I promise this is a case of a “quick and easy” survey actually being quick and easy).
- Wondercraft has launched an AI agent dubbed Wonda, which is designed around using conversational prompts to generate audio.
- Ausha has dropped a new free tool called Ausha Charts, which tracks a podcast’s rankings on Apple and Spotify regardless of where the show is hosted.
- With the launch of the Frequency Premium Publisher Network, the company has also rebranded from Frequency Ads to Frequency.media, reflecting the company’s wider focus of tech, media, and monetization.
- Libsyn has debuted PodRoll, a new monetization and discoverability feature that automates full episode feed drops of similar podcasts hosted on the platform.
