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.
Spotify is soaring, but its ad business is floundering. Here’s why by Lara O’Reilly
Spotify’s Q2 report shows the company overall is going strong, but zooming in to their quarterly ad revenue finds it is down 0.7% year-over-year. Reportedly the experience as both a publisher and an advertiser has degraded in recent months, with layoffs making it more difficult to talk to an actual person at Spotify. Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger told Business Insider it used to only take hours to get a response from the Spotify team about an ad question, now it can take days. Still podcasts are a big part of the advertising strategy, as detailed in a recent AdExchanger interview with Spotify’s Global Head of Product and Commercial Growth Chloe Wix.
Wondercraft Debuts new prompt-based Wonda AI Agent
Wonda is a new gen-AI agent designed specifically for conversational prompting. Wondercraft users can describe what they want to Wonda, which then uses Wondercraft tools to generate, edit, and refine audio. The core premise of Wonda’s conversational interface is giving clients the ability to create professional-sounding audio without the technical skills or hyper-specific knowledge of editing software required to pull them off by hand. Wonda currently only produces audio, but a video beta is slated to be rolled out in the fall.
As for the rest of the news…
- Libsyn has debuted PodRoll, a new monetization and discoverability feature that automates full episode feed drops of similar podcasts hosted on the platform.
- Nielsen has released their Podcast Today report, which finds podcasts represent 19% of daily ad-supported audio listening time.
- This month Flightpath turns 4 years old, and they’re celebrating with a look back.
- PodPoll 2025, a comprehensive annual survey of Australian listening habits and behaviors, is now available. Including the finding that 69% of 25 to 34-year-olds listen on a monthly basis.
- ADOPTER Media head of client services Adam McNeil is kicking off a five-day event on his LinkedIn, sharing insider details for picking shows for podcast campaigns.
- Former DWNLOAD Media CEO Chris Peterson has been announced as Red Seat Ventures Vice President, Business Development.
