This is the download from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I'm Gavin Gaddis. The download recap is brought to you by Podscribe. You can find out more at Podscribe.com. building stickier podcasts, podcast industry ad revenue sees double-digit 2024 growth, Chrome cancels third-party cookies prompt, and video podcasts could be coming to Netflix soon. Let's get started. you
This week from Tom Webster, it sounds profitable. The latest data from the advertising landscape finds ad-supported podcasts have reached 31% monthly usage by Americans 18+. Putting the medium ahead of Snapchat. and several other platforms a layperson would presume are bigger than podcasting. That said, only 61% convert to daily or near-daily listening, below the average conversion rate of 70% across all media types.
Webster brings back his pitch to podcasting from the keynote presentation he gave at Evolutions by Podcast Movement. podcasting has focused on building a stage when it should be building the entire theater. A quote from Webster, quote, The stage is your show. It's where you perform, where you deliver your monologue or interview or narrative.
It's where the official content happens, and most podcasters stop there, focusing entirely on making the show itself better. That's important, don't misunderstand me, but it's incomplete. A theater isn't just a stage, end quote. In addition to the stage, he establishes two other vital components, a backstage where parasocial relationships are evolved into something more connective. This could be newsletters, Discord servers, live meet and greets.
and a lobby acting as a focal point for listeners to connect with each other. This could be community forums, comment sections that are actively moderated by hosts, in-person fan meetups even without the host. and fan created wikis. Point being, podcasting has done well to be listened to by almost a third of the country on a monthly basis, but it's leaving far too many people who would be passionate podcast peeps by the wayside due to lack of stickiness.
Last Thursday from Brad Hill at Rain News, a new report looks at the ad revenue in 2024 overall in the advertising industry. According to the data from PwC and the IAB last year, digital advertising industry overall reached $259 billion of ad revenue, a 15% year-over-year increase from 2023. Zooming in to look at podcasting specifically growth continues to be the trend.
Podcast ad revenue increased to $2.4 billion last year, a 26% year-over-year increase, and a healthy jump compared to the 5% increase from 2022 to 2023. While the growth is great, it did have help from a one-two punch of cyclical events, namely the Olympics and the U.S. presidential election, and the IAB cautions that there will likely be some momentum lost this year due to uneasiness.
over how tariffs will impact advertising revenue. You can find the full IAB report available for free with a link in the newsletter version and on the website linked in the show notes. This Tuesday from Allison Schiff at AdExchanger, the proposed update to Chrome that would require users to manually give third-party cookies permission, similar to how Apple approaches it.
has been axed. Effectively, the last six years of plans to sunset the current state of third-party cookies in Chrome has been wiped clean. Google still tends to invest in privacy sandbox APIs, and users can still enable existing privacy settings in Chrome. Schiff also proposes the possibility that locking down third-party cookies beyond the concerns of advertisers
has legal implications. A quote from the article, quote, not to mention that Apple just got hit with a 150 million euro fine in late March by France's competition authority. for using its app tracking transparency framework to further its own interests at the expense of competitors. France's decision improves the odds that Germany, which is running a parallel investigation into antitrust concerns related to app tracking transparency, will come to a similar conclusion. End quote.
As for the near future, Google still plans to enhance tracking protections in Chrome's incognito mode, which currently blocks third-party cookies by default. Last Thursday from Caitlin Houston at The Hollywood Reporter. During Netflix's quarterly earnings call, Ted Sarando said the company... is looking constantly for other forms of content and content creators to feature on Netflix.
To an analyst's question about video podcasts, he responded, quote, As the popularity of video podcasts grow, I suspect you'll see some of them find their way to Netflix, end quote. A logical move given the growth of both video podcasting specifically and the general openness of streamers to accepting content creator video on their platforms. YouTubers have been able to upload videos to Amazon Prime for quite a long time.
Quite a few successful video game personalities have fast free ad support streaming channels on services like Roku, redistributing their YouTube and podcast content to the wider video ecosystem. This wider context, combined with Netflix's open embrace of audio podcasting as a supplemental marketing strategy for their own content, suggests Sarandos' tease will come to fruition sooner rather than later.
Finally, it's time for our quick hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for full coverage in today's episode, but I argue are still worth including in your weekend reading. This weekend I have for you... Spotify and Video Star and Coleman amplify research and webinar. This is from Brad Hill at Rain News, part of a two-part coverage of From Explosion to Evolution, The State of Video Podcasting.
Hill covers both the new report and the debut webinar hosted by Jay Noklis and Steve Goldstein. A new post on the Quill blog looks at the subtle branding in branded podcasts, highlighting what has worked for successful business podcasts and how they benefit brands. Right Side Up has run an ad on the Crooked Network. The source link I provided in the newsletter version will take you to that ad on an episode of Pod Save America, isolated in PodScribe transcript.
The Podglomerate and AIR are hosting a free webinar titled What Audio Producers Really Need to Know About Video Podcasting. This will be hosted on Zoom Thursday, May 21st at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And the New York Times takes a look at the current podcast award scene and where the industry is in terms of having our own version of the Oscars.
That was the download recap brought to you by Sounds Profitable. I know I went through today's stories fast, so be sure to check out the links to every article mentioned right in your podcast listening app, or you can head to the download section of soundsprofitable.com. Thank you for sticking with us as we bring you the top stories you might have missed this past week. I'm Gavin Gaddis. Our producers are myself, Brian Barletta, and Tom Webster. Once again, special thanks to you for listening.
Robot? Download complete.