More Commercials Clutter Podcasts

Ads in the second quarter of this year took up an average of 10.9% of podcast run times, up from 7.9% in the second quarter of 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal citing new research from marketing agency Oxford Road and audio measurement company Podscribe. 

In 2024, podcasters collected 6 cents in ad revenue per hour of programming that was heard by a listener, an increase from just under 5 cents in 2021 and 2 cents in 2015.

To some, the numbers represent a win for podcasting—a medium that has steadily increased its audience over the past two decades, offering a more intimate experience than other media, and which only recently convinced large multinational brands to become advertisers.

But others worry the industry is getting too greedy in its race to monetize and might wind up killing value for advertisers and the intimate experience for listeners in the process. 

“Some publishers have already pushed their ad load beyond where it should be,” said Dan Granger, the chief executive and founder of Oxford Road, which helps marketers create and buy time for podcast ads. “This is not going in a direction that’s going to end well for any of us.” 

The first podcasts to sell ads would often place one commercial at the beginning of their show, and another in the middle. Now it isn’t uncommon for podcasts to run ads after every 10 minutes, stack two or three ads per commercial break and play even more at the end of each episode. A recent hourlong episode of Alex Cooper’s popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast, for example, included eight ads over four slots. 

To be sure, podcasts’ ad load is still relatively low compared with almost every other type of media, according to Emarketer figures. And some analysts think the most popular podcasts could stand to carry even more ads, given U.S. consumers’ historic capacity to endure commercial breaks on TV and radio. Only 10% of podcast listeners describe podcast ads as intolerable or barely tolerable, while 42% think they are “slightly annoying, but tolerable,” according to data from SoundsProfitable, a podcasting research and advocacy group. 

But other podcasting executives think that adding more ads to podcast episodes would backfire. Research from Oxford Road and Podscribe found that the likelihood of a listener responding to an ad—by visiting an advertiser’s website or making a purchase, for example—decreases as the number of ads per episode goes up.