The Effectiveness of Podcast Advertising

The following is an excerpt from an article in, Fast Company. For the full article, follow the link at the bottom of this page.

Podcast ads are unique. Unlike advertising on almost any other medium, people like the interruption, mid-program…

“People really pay attention to the ads,” Slate‘s podcasting guru Andy Bowers says. That’s partly because they have to: The hosts are often right in your ear, and there’s no quick way to change the station, like on a radio. Even scrolling past an ad takes more effort than it’s worth. What if you skip ahead too far?

But more than that, listeners like and trust hosts. Their paid promotional messages sound more like a friend’s recommendation than a sponsorship.

Podcast ads generate ridiculous levels of engagement.

“Engagement” rather than sheer volume is an increasingly powerful audience metric. Internal Midroll surveys of 300,000 listeners found that 63% of people bought something a host had peddled on his show. Because of that leverage, Midroll “charges a lot, actually” for podcast ads, said Sachs. And so does Slate, reportedly.