This Week in the Business of Podcasting
by Gavin Gaddis
It’s been a bit of a hot one out here in the corn-specked hills of Indiana, folks. 90° F at midnight is a rough time, I tell you what. While the soybeans bake in the fields, things are heating up in the world of podcasting as well, with Podcast Movement NYC drawing ever-closer. Let’s look back at this week’s developments.
Podcast Movement returns to New York September 17-18 at Terminal 5, and Sounds Profitable's Tom Webster runs through the keynote lineup worth planning around. Webster opens Thursday with The Podcast Landscape 2026, the fourth annual edition of the study, this year drawing on more than 5,400 consumers. He teases a genuinely surprising headline finding, that for the first time Apple has fallen out of the top three podcast platforms, displaced by an unexpected competitor, a shift he frames as a sea change in how the industry talks about what it does.
The rest of the stage leans toward creators and platforms. SiriusXM Media's Greg Leader joins John “MrBallen” Allen on turning fandom into a multi-platform brand across YouTube, podcasts, social, and live shows without losing audience trust. Arielle Nissenblatt and Lauren Passell bring their crowd-sourced session WTF is a Podcast in 2026, built from attendee interviews on how people actually discover and consume shows. And Head of Product for YouTube Podcasts Steve McLendon closes the keynotes with a look at new audio-first listening features and tools for turning long episodes into clips.
Under 200 tickets are left for Podcast Movement, and if you book by the end of day today your logo/show art will be displayed in a section of Times Square. Register here.
YouTube's recent change to how it counts views has thrown fresh confusion into podcast measurement, and Oxford Road CEO and Founder Dan Granger argues that might be exactly what the industry needed. By stirring the pot, YouTube is inadvertently proving why podcasting needs cross-platform measurement it can actually trust. Granger says the shift felt like "a kick in the pants" at first, but the resulting chaos makes the case for standardization better than any pitch deck could.
Bumper co-founder Dan Misener ran the numbers and found the new metric counts nearly double what the old one did, meaning a show can appear to have roughly twice the plays overnight with no change in actual listening. For advertisers trying to line a YouTube figure up against a downloads or streams number, the takeaway is that cross-platform comparisons only hold when everyone agrees on what is being counted.
Australia's internet advertising market grew 14% year over year to $19.8 billion in FY26, its strongest financial-year growth since FY22, according to IAB Australia. Audio climbed 6.6% to $353 million, and podcasting led the way inside that number, rising 10.1% and now accounting for 40% of all audio spend. Podcast advertising also set a fresh quarterly record of $40 million in the June 2026 quarter, up 13.1% on the year before. IAB Australia CEO Gai Le Roy credited much of the momentum to always-on rather than campaign-cycle spending, with small and medium businesses, retailers, and overseas advertisers all putting more money into the channel.
The growth comes with a caution from the same body. In its Future of Measurement review, IAB Australia argues the industry's biggest gap is not a shortage of measurement methods but a lack of shared data standards. The report found strong confidence in measuring individual channels yet far weaker confidence in gauging their collective impact, with cross-media audience measurement flagged as the largest unresolved problem while channel-specific currencies still operate in silos. Its central recommendation is to adopt a common campaign-data taxonomy. The IAB US Campaign Data Standards 1.0 could potentially act as a template for Australia, acting as a launchpad for new standards instead of starting from scratch.
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Quick Hits
While they may not be top story material, the articles below from this week are definitely worth your time:
Arielle Nissenblatt's Trailer Park: The Podcast Trailer Podcast is launching a three-part miniseries built on Coleman Insights research into what makes a trailer work, drawing on a study in which 500 U.S. listeners reacted to four real trailers and authenticity outperformed slick production in three of the four tests.
Netflix is adding podcasts from Katt Williams, Harlan Coben, and Stephanie Soo while renewing originals including Murder with My Husband and The Pete Davidson Show, a sign of deeper investment in audio alongside its video business.
Earmax Media co-founder Andy Maxwell argues podcast advertisers should look past cheap reach and low CPMs, prioritizing conversions, brand affinity, and tightly engaged niche communities over raw scale.
YouTube is teaming with Variety on an inaugural Creator Festival at the Toronto International Film Festival, where creators including Mark Vins, Ziwe, and Andrew Rea will debut exclusive video content on the platform.
