Podcast listening keeps making gains, and the medium is becoming a bigger part of marketers’ audio strategies.

Podcasts are expected to reach more than 500 million listeners worldwide by 2024. With this growth and innovations in podcast advertising in mind, many marketers now see the channel as essential to their media buying strategy.

Podcasting finds favor with brand advertisers: US ad spending on podcasts is growing at double-digit rates and will pass $2 billion in 2023.

On today's episode, we discuss how much "Top Gun: Maverick" is helping movie theaters recover, why the number of American video game players is shrinking, the headwinds threatening air travel's recovery, how much money Spotify made from podcast ads, when Amazon may overtake Walmart as the largest retailer in the US, an unpopular opinion about the movie-viewing experience, how Bluetooth got its name, and more. Tune in to the discussion with our analysts Dave Frankland and Paul Verna and director of forecasting Oscar Orozco.

Podcasts have Spotify seeing dollar signs. The company’s US podcast ad revenues will hit $191.9 million in 2022 and cross the $400 billion mark in 2024, with growth well into the double-digit percentages. The format will also make up an increasing share of Spotify’s overall ad revenues: 16.7% of its $1.15 billion in US ad revenues this year, before growing to 19.4% in 2024.

BetterHelp bested other US podcast advertisers in 2021 and spent $76.9 million on podcast placements that year. This was nearly triple the outlays of NBCUniversal, the second-biggest spender, at $27.7 million. All told, the top 10 podcast advertisers invested close to $300 million.

Learn about the new Amazon Style store, podcasts on Twitter and LinkedIn, advertising at the NBA All-Star Game, who America’s truckers are, and more. Tune in to the discussion with our analysts Peter Vahle and Blake Droesch and director of forecasting Oscar Orozco.

Spotify adds clickable ads to its advertising lineup: The audio streaming company aims to transform podcast advertising with visual and interactive experiences.

On today's episode, we discuss when cable households will dip below 50%, an alternative search engine to Google, clickable podcast ads on Spotify, what the "superest" super app is in the West, the biggest takeaways from CES 2022, some uncommon knowledge about sustainability, where sunglasses originally came from, and more. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer principal analyst Paul Verna, analyst Blake Droesch, and director of reports editing at Insider Intelligence Rahul Chadha.

We forecast that US podcast ad spending will surpass $2 billion next year and $3 billion by 2026. Podcasts will account for over a quarter of digital audio services ad spending in 2022 and will be more than a third of spending by the end of 2026.