by Gavin Gaddis
According to Magellan AI data, podcasting’s biggest advertiser is BetterHelp with a lifetime estimated spend of $242 million in the industry since 2023. Bloomberg's Ashley Carman profiles Brittany Clevenger, the online therapy company's senior director of growth marketing. In 2025, BetterHelp’s team worked with roughly 1,500 creators, and the brand keeps ads running on more than 1,000 shows at any given moment.
MS NOW is deepening its bet on Crooked Media, adding Jon Lovett's Lovett or Leave It video podcast to its Saturday night lineup beginning September 12. The show will air at 11 p.m. ET following Crooked as a limited series running through the 2026 midterm elections. Lovett or Leave It, which launched in 2017 and tapes weekly in front of a live Hollywood audience, has racked up more than 200 million listens and views across YouTube and podcast platforms. The move builds on an earlier deal that brought a Crooked Media block featuring clips from shows like Pod Save America and Strict Scrutiny to the network.
A Digiday dive into the creator economy that still has no agreed-upon way to price talent, leaving brands guessing and often overpaying. Roughly half of marketers misprice creator fees and 40% say they feel they have overpaid, while one influencer marketing CEO estimates brands pay too much 90% of the time. Proposed fixes range from rate calculators like Fohr's Rate Check and Billion Dollar Boy's Companion to formal industry standards, though the IAB has published a creator taxonomy without any pricing guidance. Skeptics point out that the people building the tools are not the ones setting the prices.
NPR is taking its podcast-contest model to the other end of the age spectrum with a new Senior Podcast Challenge, inviting Americans 65 and older to submit original audio stories of up to eight minutes. Entries are due November 30, must be entirely original with no copyrighted music, and cannot use artificial intelligence in the writing or presentation. The grand-prize winner and a guest earn a trip to NPR headquarters in Washington and airtime on Weekend Edition Sunday early next year. The contest extends the format NPR built with its Student Podcast Challenge in 2018 and College Podcast Challenge in 2020, this time courting a demographic of roughly 60 million people that is both the fastest-growing part of the population and a fast-growing slice of the podcast audience.
…as for the rest of the news:
On today’s episode of PodBiz, our very own Sounds Profitable Head of Communications Molly DeMellier details why you want to be at Podcast Movement 2026 in New York.
CoHost and Quill are running Brand Camp, a free quarterly webinar series for B2B marketers, with the next session on September 17 on how podcasts fit into an ABM strategy.
On the latest Podnews Weekly Review, Acast CEO Greg Glenday and Backyard Ventures CEO Matt Cisneros discuss why Acast bought the U.S. creator network in a $20 million deal.
Ari Paparo argues Google's antitrust remedy may matter more than the hot takes suggest, breaking down how forcing AdX to bid into Prebid and Google Ads to bid across rival exchanges could reshape the open web ad market.
The TWiT podcast network will move to DAX US for dynamic ad insertion and hosting starting in 2027, while keeping its host-read inventory in house.
BBC Radio 4's In Our Time launches as a video podcast on BBC iPlayer on September 17, while its audio editions continue on Radio 4, BBC Sounds, and podcast apps.
