Sounds Profitable

Today in the business of podcasting:
Tom Webster audits iHeartMedia station clusters in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City and finds that locally originating programming makes up a tiny fraction of weekday airtime, while local advertising load remains far higher, reframing what a SiriusXM acquisition would actually affect.
Amplitude Media Partners' Reggie Risseeuw breaks down recent Megaphone ad server updates, including new Priority Pre-Book campaign tools and a mandatory geotargeting requirement taking effect July 14, 2026.
WARC projects advertisers will spend over $10.5 billion during the four weeks of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, reversing a spending decline from the 2022 Qatar edition, with Spotify expecting the tournament to drive significant content consumption across its platform.
Kirby Grines examines how the most valuable ad inventory is shifting away from exposure-based outcomes toward measurable results, with creators and rights holders building vertically integrated businesses to capture that value directly.

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:
Libsyn has announced that video functionality is now available across all its hosting plans, with direct video distribution to Spotify — powered by the Spotify Distribution API — starting at $25 per month.
Marketing firm JoneKiri is offering brand sponsorship opportunities for a live performance of Hanging with Doctor Z at Netflix Is a Joke Fest, with options ranging from organic product placement to full season four title sponsorship.
Patreon has launched a redesigned Home feed featuring Quips, recommended creators, and collaboration posts, with the company reporting that creator interactions boost fan engagement more than five times above baseline.
Bauer Media and Elevate Consultancy's Sound Check Europe 2026 study finds 86% of European advertisers now consider audio a core part of their media strategy, with 82% saying podcasts reach highly engaged audiences and 47% planning to increase podcast investment.
A new study from iHeartMedia and Omnicom finds audio advertising drives measurable lift across brand metrics, with long-form host-read ads delivering up to twice the recall of shorter spots.

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:
Nielsen has integrated Triton Digital's Podcast Metrics Demos+ data into its Nielsen Media Impact planning platform, making it easier for advertisers to evaluate podcasts alongside other media channels with the same precision and comparability. Nielsen also launched Predictive Sales Lift, a new outcomes-based capability to help media buyers forecast sales lift for video ad campaigns on Nielsen One Ads.
Spotify's Q1 2026 earnings show continued growth across the board, with Premium subscribers up 9% year over year to 293 million, Monthly Active Users up 12% to 761 million, and total revenue reaching €4.5 billion — a 14% constant currency increase over 2025.
A new Precisify survey of 1,000 U.S. teens and Millennials finds YouTube is the one platform both generations share, reaching 83% of Gen Z respondents and 78% of Millennials, with nearly 45% of each group spending at least 30 minutes to an hour on the platform daily.
The Nigerian Podcast Index 2025 Report surveys 329 shows to map Africa's largest English-language audio market, finding the ecosystem heavily reliant on Spotify for Creators at 58% of indexed shows, with a persistent lack of audience data identified as the industry's key challenge.

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:
iHeartMedia and Sirius XM are in preliminary talks about a potential merger that would combine the largest radio station owner and the largest satellite radio service in the United States, creating a company with more than $12 billion in combined annual sales.
S&P Global Market Intelligence data shows U.S. podcast listening grew 10 percentage points from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, with nearly 60% of online adults now reporting they listen, a figure that aligns with Sounds Profitable's Podcast Landscape 2025 research when video-only listeners are factored in.
Spotify has launched new fitness features for free and Premium subscribers, including curated workout playlists and access to more than 1,400 on-demand Peloton classes, alongside a new Claude AI integration that delivers personalized recommendations based on users' listening data.
Spanish-language podcast platform iVoox has debuted what may be the first formal television ad campaign for a dedicated podcast app, developed by agency Drop&Vase and airing on Mediaset España channels in Spain.
European audio platform Audion has raised $15 million to fund its expansion into the United States, with investment going toward go-to-market operations, partnerships, and product development.

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.

This week in the business of podcasting:
SiriusXM Media has become the exclusive audio advertising representative for YouTube in the United States, giving advertisers the ability to buy guaranteed audio ad impressions against YouTube audiences at scale for the first time through SiriusXM's combined ad technology stack.
Sounds Profitable's new Audio Primes report, drawn from The Podcast Landscape 2025, identifies the 22% of podcast consumers who listen to 75% or more of their shows as audio, and examines the measurement gap that arises when platforms track video while listeners are consuming audio.
Bumper co-founder Jonas Woost launched Bumper Score, a new third-party audience verification metric that rates podcast ad delivery on a scale of 0 to 200, aiming to give media buyers a standardized, comparable measure of whether ads are reaching real, verified listeners.
Content platform beehiiv has surpassed its Q2 goal for podcast signups by more than 10x and is expanding its feature set with a new AI-powered podcast data tool and a webinar hosting feature supporting up to 10,000 attendees.

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.