Report: advertisers spent ~$314M on podcast ads in 2017, up 86% YoY from ~$169M in 2016, with 35.7% of spending coming from brand-awareness ads and content
Total spending on podcast ads rose 86% last year, but the format remains relatively niche — Marketers are starting to tune in to the growing appetite for podcasting. Tweets: @marshallk See also Mediagazer Tweets: Marshall Kirkpatrick / @marshallk : Podcast advertising, while still small, grew a lot last year. Podcasts are super fun to listen to & the advertising tends to feel real human. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This WSJ-reported figure was the first hard baseline for a market that later reports kept re-sizing upward: the following year's tally showed US podcast ad spend reaching $479.1M in 2018, and IAB/PwC measurement eventually put it at $1.45B for 2021. The 86% jump off a small base matters less than its composition — 35.7% of 2017 spending came from brand-awareness ads and content, signaling that podcasting was pulling in marketers beyond the direct-response hosts-reads that built the format.
First-order effects
- Brand advertisers, not just performance marketers, were now allocating real budgets to podcasts, forcing publishers to sell against awareness objectives rather than promo codes alone.
- Podcast networks gained a growth story to pitch talent and investors with at a moment when the medium was still described as relatively niche.
Second-order effects
- Growth of this shape created demand for standardized measurement and automation — the gap PwC later flagged when crediting the advent of programmatic ads as a driver pushing global revenue past $1B by end-2019.
- Competing audio formats and radio sellers faced a new rival for brand budgets, while concerns about falling ad prices emerged even as overall budgets grew (podcasting moving past its gold rush stage).
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory held — and subsequent IAB reports showed revenue compounding through 2020's $842M and beyond — podcasting would consolidate around measured, programmatically traded inventory, shifting power toward whoever owned audience data and ad-tech rails rather than individual shows.
- A maturing brand-ad market would pressure the industry to professionalize attribution, making host-read authenticity harder to price and opening a split between premium human-delivered spots and scaled automated ones.
The trend: Podcast advertising was transitioning from a niche direct-response channel into a measured, brand-funded mainstream market, with each annual report resetting the baseline higher.