As always with these periodic reports, Magellan used a proprietary model to estimate advertising spend, number of downloads. A combination of research and estimation is used to arrive at advertising cost per thousand downloads (CPM), distinguishing between host-read and recorded ads, and whether the ads were delivered programmatically or purchased directly.
Magellan AI released its Podcast advertising benchmark report for Q3 of this year, distilling the company’s analysis of over 100,000 episodes of popular podcasts.
As always with these periodic reports, Magellan used a proprietary model to estimate advertising spend, number of downloads. A combination of research and estimation is used to arrive at advertising cost per thousand downloads (CPM), distinguishing between host-read and recorded ads, and whether the ads were delivered programmatically or purchased directly.
A 20-page presentation deck (freely available HERE) starts with a distillation of key findings, revealing the most basic landscape of podcast advertising, shown below.
While the year-over-year metric above (+18%) is impressive, the previous year-over-year in Q3 (comparing 2024 to 2025) shows a more startling growth of 26%:
In other slides we see the fastest growing industry (Grocery, with +42% spend from the previous year).)
For sheer spending power, that “biggest industries by spend” shows us that Financial Services is perched atop that measurement, with $110,900,000 in Q3, a YoY gain of 27%, with that money touching 652 brands.
Anyone wondering which category of podcast earned the most ad time (as a percentage of episode content) — which we admit would be an odd detail to wonder about — can confidently know that it is True Crime … arguably the founding podcast type in the genre.
Many interesting details are explored, as is typical of Magellan’s work. We are looking at:
- Average ad load by episode length
- Stacking podcast and simulcast metrics against each other
- Podcast genres which captured the most new brands (think Sports)
- Most common ad lengths and positions (30-second midrolls win by far)
- Data about single-advertiser podcast episodes
- Ad loads by show popularity
All this and more data immersion is at hand, HERE. It’s free and downloadable.
