Podcast advertising might be growing at faster rate than internet advertising

A miscellaneous LinkedIn post had us browsing the AdAge national Advertisers 2019 Fact Pack, in which ad revenue for different marketing channels is projected. After reading many RAIN Predictions about podcast advertising growth in 2020, I though it might be interesting to compare rate of projected growth through 2021.

AdAge: National Leading Advertisers 2019 Fact Pack

This is the AdAge graphic which sparked our curiosity:

That upward-moving yellow line is the broad channel of the internet, streaking into the stratosphere at a 50+% growth rate. Now, there are major and obvious difference when comparing podcast ad growth with the entire internet. The enternet has at least three more zeroes on every dollar figure. Besides being immense in content scale, it has been building its marketing and data businesses for decades.

So disregarding those factors for a minute, we took out the IAB/PwC Podcast Revenue Report from last year, which represented 2018 actual revenue (actually a sampled estimate) and projected ad revenue for 2019-2021.

The object here is to compare growth rate, not dollar totals, for the years 2019-2021. Here’s the result:

SOURCES: AdAge: National Leading Advertisers 2019 Fact Pack & IAB 2018 Podcast Revenue Study

To be clear, again, podcasting is not catching up to the advertising revenue of the entire internet. It is just moving faster according to these two projections.

 


Brad Hill