PwC: global podcast ad revenue to pass $1B by the end of 2019 and hit $1.4B by 2023, in part due to the advent of programmatic ads in podcasts
Esther Kezia Thorpe / What's New in Publishing :
Context & Ripple Effects
Podcast advertising has been compounding fast: US advertiser spend rose from roughly $169M in 2016 to ~$314M in 2017, then to $479.1M in 2018, up 53% year over year. PwC's new projection extends that curve globally — past $1B worldwide by the end of 2019 and toward $1.4B by 2023 — and names programmatic ads as a key driver.
The forecast lands just months after industry observers flagged that podcasting was moving past its gold rush stage, with questions already surfacing about falling ad prices even as audiences and budgets grew. Programmatic is the mechanism that resolves that tension: it turns scarce, manually sold host-read slots into inventory that can be bought at scale.
First-order effects
- Podcast publishers gain a second revenue lane alongside premium host-read spots, letting them fill unsold inventory with dynamically inserted programmatic ads rather than leaving episodes under-monetized.
- Advertisers who previously found podcast buying too bespoke — one show, one negotiation at a time — can now purchase across catalogs programmatically, widening the buyer pool beyond the early-adopter brands that drove the 2017–2018 spend surge.
Second-order effects
- Ad-tech intermediaries and measurement vendors get pulled into podcasting as programmatic scales, forcing the medium to adopt the impression-level standards of digital audio and display — a prerequisite for brand budgets that report against CPMs.
- Host-read rates face downward pressure as programmatic supply grows, sharpening the split between premium human-read endorsements and cheaper automated insertions that the gold-rush-era commentary was already worrying about.
Third-order effects
- If programmatic adoption holds, podcasting consolidates around networks and platforms with large enough catalogs to make automated buying efficient, squeezing independent shows that lack the scale or sales infrastructure to participate.
- Standardized, measurable inventory positions podcasting to compete directly with streaming audio and radio for mainstream brand budgets — the structural shift from niche direct-response channel to a line item in national media plans.
The trend: Podcasting is transitioning from hand-sold host-read deals to programmatic distribution, converting a boutique ad market into a scalable digital-audio category.