Podcast Ad Revenue Sees Slowdown in 2022 – The Hollywood Reporter

Podcasting had a more sober 2022 — at least when it came to advertising.

According to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, released on Thursday ahead of the Podcast Upfront presentations, total ad revenue for the podcast industry reached $1.8 billion during 2022, falling short of the $2.1 billion figure that the IAB had forecasted in its previous advertising revenue study.

Though podcasting continues to see advertising growth rates outpace other digital mediums (including video and social media, which grew by 19 percent and 4 percent, respectively), last year’s ad revenue performance was a marked slowdown compared to the boom times of 2021, when total podcast ad revenue grew by 72 percent to cross $1 billion for the first time.

At the time, the IAB predicted that the podcast market would hit $4.2 billion by 2024. Thursday’s report has reevaluated that timeline, placing podcasting’s 2024 revenue projections at $3.2 billion. (The latest study is forecasting that podcasting ad revenue will fall just under the $4 billion threshold by 2025.)

As for marketing spend, the top genres in podcasting saw a major shift during 2022. For the first time since 2018, news was overtaken by sports, comedy, and society and culture as the top content genres for marketing spend.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, which is a media partner of the IAB Podcast Upfronts, IAB Media Center VP Eric John said the decline in news was likely due to 2022 being a gap year in between election cycles. “The pandemic is receding, so we’re returning to in-person life, and so you’re seeing an uptick in, in society and culture and comedy and sports — all that stuff is driven by face-to-face life,” John said. “It’s not that news is not important, but I think people are probably expressing an interest to not engage in a minute-to-minute cycle that we all lived through in the pandemic.”

True crime, a stalwart of podcasting, also saw a decline in revenue share during 2022. But John said he believed the change was indicative of the growing diversity within podcasting, with listeners being introduced to more genres within the medium, rather than listeners “dropping true crime.”

But as for quarterly performance, 2022 was weighed down by a weak fourth quarter. Even though Q4 has typically been the strongest quarter for the medium, last year’s fourth quarter dipped to its lowest level — 29 percent — since 2017, according to the IAB report.

“Everyone who’s in advertising knows that Q4 last year was a huge challenge,” John said. “Podcasting wasn’t immune to that to that. There was a lot of pausing taking place. Despite that, we’re pleased to see the growth that we have.”