by Gavin Gaddis

Hope you’re rested and ready for day two of Podcast Movement! I’ll be holding down the fort here in Indiana, but y’all have fun with New York. Say hi to the Sounds Profitable crew for me, get a good bagel, wave to a pigeon. For now, let’s look back that the news from this week in the business of podcasting.

Podcast Week in New York opened with the Sounds Profitable Business Summit, and This American Life's Ira Glass set the tone in the first session. His argument was that podcasts go far deeper than most influencer content, and that the closeness listeners feel to a host is exactly what makes the advertising work harder than a quick social impression ever could.

That theme of quality over anxiety carried into a later panel on Spotify's skip button test. Acast CEO Greg Glenday noted that some creators had pulled their shows from Spotify in response, but argued the industry should raise ad quality rather than fear transparency. Right Side Up's Krystina Rubino was blunter about creator nerves: "If your ads suck, maybe you should do better." She compared the moment to the banner ads that once cluttered the web, adding that "if you're afraid of sharing consumption data with your advertisers, you have a deeper problem."

The Summit also brought news. The team behind Serial announced Metro, an always-on narrative series about New York launching in October with companion short-form video for social. And for anyone who missed the room, Business Summit photos are now available to download using access pin 8086. Podcast Movement photos are available here, with the pin 2045. Also, full session videos are now up on the Sounds Profitable YouTube channel.

Writing in The Roast, ADOPTER Media's Adam McNeal worked through a disagreement with colleague Glenn Rubenstein over how the industry should respond to YouTube's redefinition of a "view." YouTube now counts a view from the first frame, even a zero-second hover, which inflates public view counts without adding a single real listener, while the older watch-time metric has been renamed "Engaged View" and tucked into analytics. Rubenstein's fix was to add contract language requiring that any YouTube impression guarantees be based on engaged views rather than the inflated public number.

McNeal's first instinct was that the language was unnecessary, since ADOPTER has always estimated performance from observable signals like comment-to-view ratios and retention rather than the headline count. He came around, though, on the grounds that an insertion order term is not about one agency's process but about the standard the whole industry is willing to sign its name to. "An IO term is a standard you're willing to put your name on," he writes. His larger caveat is that YouTube owns these definitions and can move them again whenever it likes, which is precisely why he argues buyers should anchor deals to the more meaningful number while they still can.

Spotify is bringing its Partner Program to more than 35 new markets this fall, including Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, in what is the program's largest geographic expansion yet. Eligible creators can earn from video impressions served to Premium subscribers and from ad revenue on the free tier, all while keeping their own sponsorship deals and the freedom to distribute their shows elsewhere.

Spotify says video podcast consumption has climbed 140% since the feature launched, and monthly payouts to enrolled shows are up more than a third since January. To smooth the on-ramp abroad, Spotify is working with hosts Acast, Audioboom, Libsyn, Omny, and Podigee so their creators can opt in without switching distributors.

At the IAB Podcast Upfront during Podcast Week, the IAB's Jason Adamski introduced a new downloadable guide covering the measurement of video podcasting, and its central message was a pointed one. Rather than endorse a single medium-agnostic standard like the recently released AMP Accords, the IAB argues the tools already exist. "The practical challenge is not the absence of standards," the guide says. "It is knowing which standard applies where."

In place of a new framework, the IAB points to two existing IAB Tech Lab documents, the Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines and the Digital Video Served Impression Guidelines, and lays out when each should govern a given campaign. Separately, IAB Tech Lab has put version 2.3 of its podcast measurement guidelines out for public comment, clarifying how server-side download measurement applies across both audio and video, with a version 3.0 focused on streaming video podcasts expected in 2027. The stance sets up a quiet contrast with the AMP Accords camp over whether podcasting needs one unifying yardstick or better signposting of the ones it already has.

Apple rolled out its fall operating systems this week, and Apple Podcasts arrived with a wide batch of new features tied together by a single throughline: video. On Apple TV, a completely redesigned app adds sidebar navigation, video podcast playback, and channel browsing that surfaces ad-free and early-access options, while on macOS the app now launches straight into a video player with full-screen and picture-in-picture modes.

The upgrades are not limited to the living room. Across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, video episodes now carry full read-along transcripts, chapters, and media links, and a new Search in Show bar lets listeners find episodes by guest, title, keyword, or even a passing mention buried in the transcript.

Podscribe has partnered with Rumble in a first-of-its-kind integration bringing direct attribution to baked-in video host-read ads.

Advertisers can now connect Rumble ad exposure to website visits, conversions, purchases, and other outcomes without relying on modeled attribution.

Rumble also provides privacy-compliant signals that meet the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting (AMP) attribution spec, enabling more precise and transparent measurement across creator campaigns.

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