by Tom Webster
Four keynotes, a Landscape surprise, and one very good deadline.

Before we get into this, the last announcement of Podcast Movement programming in this newsletter, an acknowledgment: The biggest stars of Podcast Movement are you: the attendees, the creators, the podcasters, and the people working in this industry who help support this event and what we’re trying to do here. You’re the real stars, and we wanted to say so somewhere bigger than a newsletter.

So here is a deadline, because it’s two days away. If you register for Podcast Movement by the end of the day on Friday, September 4, the art for your podcast or the logo for your company goes up in the middle of Times Square. There are fewer than 200 tickets left, and at $199 for the whole shebang, they won’t last long.

We’ve rented display space there to celebrate our partners, our friends, and most of all the people coming to Podcast Movement. The process is short: register, and you'll be added to the Podcast Movement app (it's Swapcard), and inside that app you can submit the logo for your show or your company so we can display it. That's it! Your show, in lights, in Times Square, right next to the Elmos and the spider people, which is about as close to a Broadway opening as most of us are going to get.

Consider it a celebration of you, of this industry, and of the creative force that podcasting is, and consider Friday the deadline, because it is.

We’ve got four great keynotes on the big stage, and they are all worth the price of admission on their own (except maybe the first one, you are probably tired of that guy). Here’s the lineup:

At 11:30 I’ll release The Podcast Landscape 2026 from the stage. This is our fourth year of the study, fielded with Signal Hill Insights, and it’s the largest publicly available study focused on podcasting in America: over 5,000 consumers every year, 5,400 this year, ages 18 and up, weighted to the census so that it looks like the country rather than like the people who already listen. The 2026 data is new, and nobody has seen it yet, including most of the people who will be sitting in the room. The report goes out free the same day, so if you’re reading this from your couch you’ll have the numbers before I’ve found the water bottle backstage.

I’ll give you one teaser, because it’s a genuinely surprising finding (at least it was to me). Every year we ask people to name all of the platforms, apps, and services they use to consume podcasts, at least within the last month or so, and they can name as many as they like (so this isn’t “Name your primary/favorite”, just all the ones you’ve used). For the first three years of the Landscape, the three most frequently named came back in the same order: YouTube, then Spotify, then Apple. This year YouTube is number one again and Spotify is number two again, but number three is not Apple. Apple has been in that top three for as long as podcasting has been around.

The app/service that took its place is not one I would have put money on. I’m not going to say it came out of nowhere, but it signals a sea change in how we talk about what it is that we do, and in what we have to do to keep the secret sauce of podcasting intact. I’ll name it from the stage on Thursday, and then spend the rest of my half hour on how to adapt to it now, and on the kind of future we actually want in podcasting and what it takes to get there. Sorry to hold the name back for two more weeks. You can handle it, I promise.

At noon, SiriusXM Media brings John Allen to the stage, whom you know as MrBallen, the host of MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories, for a fireside conversation with Greg Leader, SiriusXM Media’s VP of Revenue Partnerships. The session is called The Fandom Effect: Turning Passion into a Multi-Platform Brand, and the title is a fair description of what John has done. He tapped into true crime’s devoted fanbase to build a breakout brand on YouTube, then carried that audience into podcasts, social, and live shows, and kept the voice and the fan trust that earned him the audience in the first place intact through all of it.

Podcasting has grown into a creator business where success runs on fandom, audience growth, monetization, and distribution across more than one platform, and John is one of the clearest examples of a creator who has managed all of those at once. Greg is going to keep the conversation practical: how a fanbase this passionate becomes a business that lasts, where the growth and the money actually came from, and what a platform partner did for him that he couldn’t have done on his own, including reaching fans wherever they happen to be. If you haven’t heard MrBallen speak at an event before, he is an absolute force and a riveting storyteller.

Friday at 11:30 belongs to Arielle Nissenblatt and Lauren Passell, and their session is called WTF is a Podcast in 2026?, which is the question this industry cannot stop arguing about and has never once settled. Rather than settle it themselves, they’re going to ask you. All week their crew will be roving Terminal 5 with a camera, putting that question to attendees along with a few others (how do you consume podcasts, what’s overhyped, name five shows in ten seconds). On Friday, Lindsey Weber takes the interviewer’s chair, the answers go up on the screen, and Arielle and Lauren dig into what the room actually said before opening it up to live questions from the audience. If you see a camera coming your way on Thursday, this is why, and you should have an answer ready.

At noon, Steve McLendon, Head of Product for YouTube Podcasts, closes out the keynotes. He’s going to walk through what’s coming for podcasters on the platform: an audio-first listening experience built for people on the move, and new tools for turning a long episode into highlights and Shorts. Whatever you think about where the audience has been going, the people building the tools that audience uses will be on our stage explaining what they’re building next, and I’d rather you hear it from them than from a press release.

The IAB Podcast Upfront is Wednesday, September 16 (I will actually be closing out the day with a short talk there before grabbing my helicopter back to Podcast Movement), and the official after party is ours, at Terminal 5, from 6 to 8 (doors open at 5). You need a ticket to one of our events, the Business Summit or Podcast Movement, or to the IAB Podcast Upfront itself, and any of the three gets you in the door.

The entertainment is a live taping of Dana Gould’s Hangin’ with Dr. Z, with support from JoneKiri, and the doctor will be conducting his interviews in full Planet of the Apes makeup, as he does. The lineup is now final: Sam Morril, Dave Hill, and Caitlin Peluffo will be on the couch with him.

Register here so we know how many of you to expect at the bar. (Is it a networking thing or a party? Still yes.)

Podcast Movement is Thursday and Friday, $199 for both days, over eighty sessions on five stages, no expo hall, and nobody on that stage paid to be there. Tickets are here. It’s the Big Apple, five big stages, and a big week for our beloved medium. Under 200 tickets left, and I hope one has your name on it!

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