by Gavin Gaddis
Inside Audio Marketing covers the IAB's recently published 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, compiled with PwC. Digital audio ad spend reached $8.4 billion in 2025, up 10.2% from 2024. Podcast revenue grew 17.6% year over year to $2.9 billion, outpacing overall digital audio.
Scalable examines Netflix's early video podcasting push. It hasn’t announced any new big-ticket podcast acquisitions as of late, and now the YouTube presences of some big-name Netflix exclusives have started to atrophy. YouTube’s podcasting product lead, Steve McLendon, tells Scalable YouTube isn’t planning to announce podcast exclusivity deals in response to Netflix. However, YouTube is working on ways for its in-house AI Gemini to suggest short clips from longer video episodes, allowing creators to quickly create promotional shortform content without manually scrubbing for clippable moments.
Last week, YouTube announced a new feature that will allow users to set daily time limits for YouTube Shorts. Once that daily timer is used up, Shorts will no longer be displayed to the user. The feature allows setting the timer to zero, removing Shorts from the YouTube homepage interface altogether. Though they will still appear in subscription feeds, meaning existing fans will still get access to that content even with the timer. Searight proposes this feature is less a sign the sky is falling for podcasters using YouTube as a discovery platform and more a sign to diversify and home in on quality content. If a prospective audience member is only allotting themselves 15 minutes of YouTube Shorts per day, make Shorts good enough to punch through into that limited time. It’s also worthwhile to diversify, cross-posting clips across all shortform video platforms (Instagram Reels, TikTok, etc.).
The new year-end report covers January to December of 2025. Highlights include full-year net sales growth of 29%. Acast North America primarily drove growth overall for the company, with a 60% full-year net sales increase y-o-y compared to 2024. The company reached 429 full-time employees, up from 2024’s total of 364.
Inside Audio Marketing covers the new Sounds Profitable study Audio Primes: The Podcast Industry’s Most Valuable Audience. The report looks at respondents to the Podcast Landscape 2025 study who consume at least 75% of their podcasts as audio (a segment dubbed “Audio Primes”). Compared to the broader podcast-consuming audience, Audio Primes skew younger, more likely to have college degrees, and over-index among higher-income households. Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster’s webinar presentation of the Audio Primes report, featuring co-presenter and RSS.com co-founder Alberto Betella, is up for viewing both on Sounds Profitable’s site and YouTube channel.
…as for the rest of the news:
Fourthwall co-founder and CEO Will Baumann has announced Eli, a new AI assistant that can help create promotions, bulk-edit products, adjust pricing, and other functions to help manage merchandise sales.
In celebration of the company’s eighth anniversary, Headliner is making several tools free for a limited time, including no watermarks, the ability to use pre-made video templates, captioning, and its video clipping tool.
Headgum has announced three more podcasts are joining Hulu’s library of licensed and companion shows, including Handsome, The Mess Around, and That Was Us.
Singer-songwriter Andy Grammer has launched Showing Up with Andy Grammer, a podcast co-produced with Companion Arts.
In a twist on podcast physical media releases, Impressions.fm is releasing a limited run best-of compilation of Bill Burr’s best Monday Morning Podcast ad reads on Vinyl Moon. For a little advertising inception, here’s Burr’s ad read for his ad read record.
Podscribe has a new post detailing its radio airchecks and attribution capabilities, including a 16-minute video walkthrough.
The Hollywood Reporter has an exclusive reveal for A History of the United States in 100 Objects, a new series from 99% Invisible host Roman Mars co-produced by SiriusXM Media and BBC Studios.
