Magellan AI’s 2022 Podcast Benchmark Report is live with current Q4 information. The study conducted by Magellan AI — podcast advertising analytics contains valuable information and loads of statistics from the most recent podcast advertising data. Their description of methodology for the study reads
“Magellan AI analyzes podcast advertising data from thousands of popular podcasts in the U.S. To prepare this report, we analyzed over 88,000 episodes of popular podcasts. To account for dynamic insertion, we sampled multiple copies of certain episodes.”
From this large sample they were able to determine some of the most important statistics regarding revenue, ad placement, genre popularity and more. To simplify the findings I’m going to walk you through some of the biggest takeaways.
The Projections Were Right
This chart displays the monthly percentage increase in podcast advertising spending from Q4 in 2022. The general consensus across the industry is that spending would continue to increase throughout the year… and it did! An 11% increase from November to December alone shows great potential for 2023 as a whole. Overall spending increased 23% from Q3 to Q4. This means that tons of new advertisers entered the market in Q4, and many already in the industry continued or increased spending. 1,718 new brands or products were advertised in Q4, with a wide variety of industries present.
The top 10 advertisers for Q4 are shown above. 7 of the 10 were also top spenders in Q3. In total, just these 10 companies combined to spend an estimated $93 million in Q4.
Growth across genres varied, but remained high
10 out of 13 genres identified by the study increased their average ad load, which is the amount of advertisers used. True Crime showed the highest percentage ad load of the 13 categories at 8.6%. Regardless of genre the greatest portion of podcasts analyzed average episodes was between half an hour and an hour. The 30-60 minute range comprised 40% of episodes. Sports podcasts brought in the most new brands, which is pretty unsurprising considering the amount of new podcasts regarding every aspect of sports imaginable now. For podcast episodes with a single advertiser, which is common, Kids & Family, Businesses and Health and Fitness were the top 3 genres. The nature of Health and Fitness podcasts allowed for the genre to contain 18% of single advertiser episodes.
Mid-Roll was the golden child of ad placement
Mid-Roll ads; ads that fall directly in the middle of an episode, were the most popular type in Q4. 54% of ads fell into the mid-roll category. Pre-roll made up 28% and post-roll trailed at 18%.
30 second advertisements were the most popular length at 38%. With the abundance of new advertisers and podcasters, keeping advertisements short and sweet is becoming a common theme.
The Q4 2022 report confirmed the expected industry growth at the end of 2022 that many experts predicted. New brands from many industries entered the market, and the industry continued to increase spending and revenue.
*all data and infographics are provided by the Magellan AI Blog: Podcast Advertising Quarterly Benchmark Report for Q4 2022.