by Gavin Gaddis
Inside Audio Marketing covers the new Triton Digital US Podcast Ranker for Q1, 2026. Comedy, News, and Society & Culture remain the top three genre categories, unchanged from Q4 2025. Kids & Family saw a 9% growth in reach quarter-over-quarter. Triton Digital says this shows podcasting is becoming part of everyday routines.
Ozen.fm co-founder and president Rodrigo Tigre writes about Brazil’s underdeveloped podcast advertising market. At current exchange rates, the U.S. digital audio industry in 2025 generated nearly as much as Brazil’s entire digital advertising market. Even though Kantar IBOPE Media’s Inside Áudio 2025 found that 92% of Brazilians consume some form of audio each month, investment in audio remains limited. As measurement matures and digital audio scales, Tigre sees Brazil’s digital audio market as one of the “last blue oceans available in marketing.”
Today Global has announced it will begin directly selling advertising across its YouTube content network. Brands will be able to access audiences for podcast series like The News Agents, Up To Speed, and My Therapist Ghosted Me. This puts Global in a limited group of U.K. media owners with the ability to direct-sell YouTube space, including ITV, Channel 4, and Sky. Global has also launched a Video Sales team led by Fatima Dowlet, formerly Channel 4 Director of Video Sales.
Podnews reports that podcast hosting company Captivate has launched HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support for alternate enclosure. Captivate users now have a tag they can enable under their video podcast settings to take advantage of this new feature. When enabled, video episodes will be visible in podcast apps supporting alternate enclosure HLS, such as Podcast Addict, Truefans, and Fountain.
Digiday and Optable have published a State of the Industry report based on surveys of 180 agencies, publishers, brands, and retailers about their use of agentic AI and AI-driven media execution. 89% of surveyed advertisers are using or building agentic AI. Advertisers express concern about brand safety (63% of respondents) and loss of control (61%).
…as for the rest of the news:
Listener.com marks its first anniversary with the launch of Campaigns 2.0, Airchecks, and Listener.com MCP that enables native integrations with Claude and ChatGPT.
Coleman Insights is set to debut new research on podcast trailers this Thursday at 1 p.m. BST on the Podcast Show London’s Talking Podcasts 1 stage.
Steve Raizes looks at the fragmented state of inventory definitions for video podcasts, which currently straddle audio, connected TV, and creator with different definitions varying by buyer.
PodX has announced Pelle Porseryd as its new Acting Managing Director, Nordics.
Basis has announced an integration with DAX US to give political advertisers exclusive access to premium audio inventory for the 2026 U.S. election cycle.
Mondo Metrics has been accepted into the ElevenLabs Startup Grant program.
