This Week in the Business of Podcasting

What a week! From killer presentations to bonding over being tired from a 4:00am fire alarm, Podcast Movement Denver has been quite the adventure. Now, as we all retreat back home from the mile-high city, here’s this week’s news.

Three updates to Apple Podcasts

As of this week, Apple now provides Subscription Analytics in Apple Podcasts Connect, adding the ability to track how many listeners started free trials, number of paid subscriptions, the percentage of users who converted from free to paid, and more.

Delegated Delivery - Apple’s system allowing hosts to directly submit episodes to a premium Apple podcast feed - announced five new companies that will be approved by the end of the year: Audiomeans, Captivate, Podbean, Podspace, and Transistor.

And last but not least in our Apple Corner: the Linkfire marketing platform has expanded into podcasts with an exclusive integration with Apple Podcasts. Linkfire for Podcasts users have the ability to generate unlimited smart links to landing pages for their podcasts, which provide anonymized audience insights to a Linkfire dashboard. Linkfire for Podcasts will start at $9.99 a month at launch.

Advertiser Perceptions: Podcast Advertising Consideration and Spending Intention Grow to Nine-Year High Among Agencies and Marketers

New this Monday from Pierre Bouvard at Westwood One: New research from Advertiser Perceptions. The annual study aims to gauge agency and brand sentiment in podcast advertising. This year’s edition surveyed 302 marketers and media agencies, finding advertisers and agency interest in podcasting has reached a nine-year high.

While podcast advertising is getting more attention, Bouvard cites Q2 Magellan AI podcast advertising benchmark report’s finding that marketers only spend $200,000 a month marketing in podcasts in the top 500. A quote from the article:

“At the dawn of cable network advertising, legendary BBDO media chief Arnie Semsky created the “5% solution,” which stipulated that brands devote 5% of media budgets to the nascent cable medium. Semsky reasoned 5% was enough of an allocation to generate meaningful impact.

Semsky was prescient. His brands hugely benefited from taking an early, bold, and strong position in a growing new medium, a lesson for the marketers of today.”

Other highlights from the study include the finding that 77% of marketers have discussed podcast advertising for potential media investment. 62% would consider advertising on podcasts in the next six months, and 58% currently advertise in podcasts, an almost 400% increase since the first IAB podcast upfront in 2015.

Older Adults Make Up Just 4% Of People Featured In Ads

A new report from creative tech company CreativeX finds advertising is underrepresenting a sizable, often affluent demographic. Their analysis included over 126,000 global ads released last year, representing $124 million dollars in ad spend. Of that sample, CreativeX found just 4% of people cast in ads were over the age of 60, an age group that represents 16% of the US population alone. From Karlene Lukovitz’s article: 

“The 60-plus demographic has a higher disposable income than younger generations, and represents 25% of global spending power, yet only 3% of digital media budgets are allocated to ads featuring this audience, according to CreativeX.

When older adults are shown in ads, nearly two-thirds (65%) of them were shown in family or domestic settings. And although the average retirement age is now 66 and rising, fewer than 1% of older adults were cast in ads that showed them in professional or leadership environments.”

Podcasting has had an uphill struggle to get traction with the 55+ demographic, which likely isn’t helped by advertising’s tendency to create ads for younger demographics.

Changes coming to Spotify for Podcasters

This week at Podcast Movement, Spotify announced several updates coming to both the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard and Megaphone. Spotify for Podcasters dashboard users will get access to impression analytics for how users find their podcast within Spotify. The invite-only Automated Ads program within Spotify has seen success in early stages and has now been extended to the UK and Australia with a goal of tripling the amount of podcasts in the program.

Starting today on Megaphone, users have access to the Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard, which aims to provide a holistic video of the Spotify Audience Network metrics, such as average CPM and ad location.

Industry Insights with Megellan AI

Podcast ad spending in the US picked up in Q2 2023, increasing 24% Q/Q and putting the market on track to grow about 33% in 2023. Average ad loads increased from 5.55% in Q1 to 5.97% in Q2 and 2,465 new brands advertised on podcasts for the first time in Q2.

Looking to get a handle on podcast advertising metrics? Book a demo with the Magellan AI team.

Quick Hits

While they may not be top story material, the articles below from this week are definitely worth your time:

• Exclusive: SXM Media partners with The Trade Desk and HUMAN by Reem Makari. SXM Media will add support for third-party audibility measurement to programmatic campaigns bought through The Trade Desk. HUMAN, a fraud sensor network accredited by the Media Rating Council to detect invalid traffic, will be a traffic validation solution for Adwizz’s marketplace inventory.

• Triton Digital Announces YouTube Integration with Podcast Metrics. The new integration adds YouTube views of podcast episodes into the Triton Podcast Metrics dashboard, allowing publishers to keep track of both podcast downloads and YouTube performance.

• PodcastOne readies public offering in September by Brad Hill. The listing of PodcastOne is based on the valuation LiveOne received in February that gave PodcastOne a market range of $230 to $274 million.

• weekly insights 8.23.2023 on-demand audio passes linear audio. Edison Research has found that as of Q2 2023, on-demand audio makes up 50.3% of daily time consuming audio.