by Gavin Gaddis

It’s a veritable Disney wonderland on our patio, folks. In addition to the squirrel (who we’ve dubbed Hank) and hummingbirds returning, now a mated pair of mourning doves have made hanging out on our feeders a mo(u)rning tradition. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the podcast industry’s partaking of a yearly tradition with The Podcast Show London (photos from which can be found here). Let’s look at what went down this week.

A new report from Sounds Profitable and Sound Insights surveyed 5,033 U.K. adults using the same methodology as the 2025 U.S. Advertising Landscape, creating a rare apples-to-apples comparison of the two markets. 

43% of British adults listen to ad-supported podcasts monthly. Of those listeners, 56% listen daily or almost daily. A quote from Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster in the official release: 

“For any media buyers who have thought of podcasts as a supplementary channel, this report will challenge every plan you’ve written for this year. It’s undeniable that podcasting has reached mainstream with UK audiences. With more than half of monthly listeners saying they tune into podcasts on a near daily basis, that proves they are bringing their favorite shows along with them in their regular routines.”

79% of U.K. podcast listeners recall hearing a podcast ad in the past week. Among that 79%, attention is nearly equal by gender (79% male, 80% female), matching what the U.S. version of The Advertising Landscape found in 2025. As Sound Insights founder Ben Robins noted in a recent Sounds Profitable article, this gender parity on both sides of the Atlantic shows it’s not just a quirk of U.K. podcast consumers — it’s structural to podcasting overall.

Owl & Co’s Global Podcast Economy Report finds the global podcast economy generated $9.2 billion in revenue in 2025, a 23% increase from 2024. A quote from Lopez’s article:

“Video is changing the picture. We built the report from over 300,000 data points across 1,600+ publishers, and spoke with more than 100 podcast publishers and experts around the world. The same pattern kept surfacing: publishers that treated video as a monetization layer, not just a discovery channel, grew revenue the fastest. (We didn’t get into the cost side, however: as we covered extensively since last year, getting video ‘right’ can be expensive, and the bar keeps rising). “

Direct advertising revenue remains the leading source of revenue year over year. Consumer revenue grew 22%, with Patreon leading as the biggest platform.

Each year, Podnews solicits feedback from podcast creators and producers about podcast platforms. This year’s report card hit a new high with over 160 podcast creators. In all, respondents provided 779 pieces of qualitative feedback, including 290 mentions of Apple, 251 of Spotify, and 207 of YouTube. 

Respondents said it is easier to get podcasts listed in major directories than it was several years ago, though U.S.-based respondents said ID verification remains a pain point when setting up a podcast on YouTube. Overall, though, YouTube is framed as a positive force for the industry, even scoring second place in the overall ranking of the top four platforms (above Spotify, below Apple Podcasts). 

Ozen.fm co-founder and president Rodrigo Tigre writes about Brazil’s underdeveloped podcast advertising market. A quote from the article:

“To put it in perspective: at current exchange rates, US digital audio alone - just audio, no video, no search, nothing else, in 2025 practically generated the same amount as Brazil’s entire digital advertising market for the year. Yes, the category that doesn’t even have its own line in the reports here in the US, is worth Brazil’s entire pie.”

Tigre identifies three causes for the spending gap in Brazilian audio that the industry has now matured enough to overcome: a fragmented digital audio space, the myth that audio can’t be measured, and cultural roadblocks of a healthy, but fragmented, radio scene. 

With modern tech, audio is measurable and available in ways that let brands without previous audio budgets achieve national reach. Brands investing in Brazil’s audio scene likely will find themselves big fish in quiet ponds, with little in the way of competition for attention or feed saturation. As measurement matures and digital audio scales, Tigre sees Brazil’s digital audio market as one of the “last blue oceans in marketing.”

How do you know if a podcast ad actually caused a conversion?

That’s the question incrementality measurement is designed to answer and Podscribe is expanding the ways advertisers can measure true causal lift across audio campaigns.

Podscribe now supports:

A major differentiator is SmartServe, Podscribe’s ad-serving layer that enables randomized listener holdout groups directly within the ad server to keep exposed and control audiences as similar as possible for more trustworthy results.

Advertisers can now measure incrementality across a wider range of campaign types, publisher environments, and budget requirements while gaining deeper insight into true podcast advertising ROI.

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