Sounds Profitable

Today in the business of podcasting:
Creator content was the most boring part of the World Cup, and Scalable pins the blame on FIFA's restrictive partner posting policies while athletes and fans drove the standout moments. The final drew 1.8 billion viewers and @fifaworldcup topped 24 billion views, TikTok's biggest content moment to date.
Audio is reaching back-to-school shoppers more consistently than video, according to a new Audacy Insights post, with 40% of parents planning to shop sooner and 80% listening to AM/FM radio weekly against 52% who watch broadcast TV.
Podcast advertising is moving past download counts to weigh a creator's cross-platform influence across YouTube, social, video, and live events, with Acast's Ricardo Neto noting mid-tier creators around 50,000 weekly downloads are drawing new buyer attention.
ROI Media 360 argues low view counts on Netflix podcasts hide stronger ad performance, citing about 60% completion versus roughly 35% on YouTube and a SKIMS campaign that delivered a verified 20% conversion lift.
Steve Goldstein profiles the fast-growing higher-education podcasting sector that measures success by influence over chart rank, pointing to Higher Ed PodCon and a community of roughly 214 organizations producing more than 1,600 podcasts combined.
To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.

Winning on quality is only half the story when the audience you want is already spending its day somewhere else.
Written by Tom Webster
Edited and narrated by Gavin Gaddis
Find the full article here.

Today in the business of podcasting:
The IAB Tech Lab has opened a 30-day public comment period on version 2.3 of its Podcast Technical Measurement Guidelines, updating how downloads, audience, and ad delivery are counted across audio and video podcasts.
Digiday breaks down five lessons from the World Cup on creator marketing, including how Unilever scaled a creator network to roughly 300,000 and how Michelob Ultra generated $11.5 million in earned media value with fewer than 350 creators.
A Media, Built newsletter piece argues that employee-creator programs modeled on Starbucks' Green Apron Creators carry unpriced legal risk around copyright, overtime pay, and labor protections.
AdExchanger talks to OpenX's chief privacy officer about the end of "actual knowledge" standards in children's privacy law, as new state rules push platforms toward a "should have known" test for underage users.
To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.

Today in the business of podcasting:
A new Nielsen Podcast Listen & Watch report finds audio remains the core of podcast consumption, with 90% of monthly listeners tuning in via audio and 62% also watching video, as listeners and viewers use the two formats in distinctly different ways.
WARC reports YouTube podcast viewing on TV screens has surged past 700 million hours monthly, up 70% year over year, even as the platform's ad revenue growth is projected to slow amid rising competition from TikTok and Netflix.
A new YouGov survey of U.S. podcast consumers finds genre preferences split sharply by gender, with men far more likely to listen to sports podcasts and women over-indexing in true crime, self-improvement, and wellness content.
Spotify's podcast strategy has shifted from paying for exclusive content to operating the infrastructure creators depend on for discovery and monetization, a repositioning that hands the company more market control with less financial risk.
To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.

Today in the business of podcasting:
Tom Webster's latest Podcast Atlas installment examines podcast clips as a discovery engine, finding 89% of listeners watch clips on social platforms and roughly a third go on to become full-episode listeners.
DAX U.S. President Brian Conlon argues the "shrinking attention span" is a myth, pointing to Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2026 finding that 45% of Americans age 12 and older listened to a podcast in the past week, the highest level ever recorded.
Six Colors previews the iOS 27 public beta, including Apple Podcasts video expanding to macOS and Apple TV and a rebuilt Siri that can retrieve old podcast episodes by description.
Creator economy newsletter Scalable reports brand safety concerns among enterprise marketers have dropped from 50% in 2023 to just 10% in 2025, with the industry shifting focus to brand fit instead.
To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.