Listen up! While podcast advertising revenue remains relatively small, it’s growing quickly — and the sector is poised for a strong double-digit gain this year, despite economic headwinds.
In 2023, U.S. podcast ad revenue is expected to total $2.28 billion, up 25% year over year, according to new research conducted by PwC for the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). Last year, the segment increased 26%, to hit $1.8 billion, per the study. By 2025, podcast advertising revenue in the U.S. is projected to reach about $4 billion.
Overall, podcasting continues to be one of the fastest-growing digital channels, growing two times faster than digital advertising overall — although for 2022 it remained less than 1% of the total pie (which PwC pegged at $209.7 billion).
One interesting finding from the report: In 2022, news podcasts dropped their share of total ad revenue — knocking it out of the No. 1 spot by genre. Sports (15%), society and culture (14%) and comedy (14%) were the top revenue-generating content genres last year, as news and political opinion content saw share drop from 19% to 12%.
Last year, “in-person sports, lifestyle events and in-store shopping have come back in a big way, taking the lead from news which held the top revenue genre spot since 2018,” said Eric John, VP, media center, at IAB. “Both mass and niche advertisers like the audiences, targeting and ROI along with the brand-safe and suitable environments that podcasting offers.”
For the report (available at this link), PwC fielded a quantitative online survey to “leading podcast industry experts” in February 2023. As in past years, that coincided with the firm’s podcast advertising market-sizing to estimate the U.S. market inclusive of companies that didn’t participate in the survey.
IAB’s “U.S. Podcast Advertising 2022 Revenue & 2023-2025 Growth Projections” study was released May 11 during the trade group’s podcast upfront event.
