Advertiser spending on podcasts has gone up to 11% since August 2022 in the US according to key findings from the Magellan AI Podcast advertising benchmark report for Q2. The top 10 podcast advertisers listed in the report spent $72m this quarter, which is up by 13% from the previous period.
The Magellan AI benchmark report is a quarterly analysis of advertising data that looks at over 70,000 episodes of the top 3,000 podcasts in the US. It factors in the number of ads, downloads, CPM, and types of ads using a proprietary model to estimate advertising spending.
Mental health platform BetterHelp remained as the number one podcast advertiser since last quarter, having spent just over $20m in Q2. Amazon followed behind in second place with $8.6m invested into podcast ads, while insurance company Progressive ranked third with $6m.
Additionally, sports podcasts were revealed to be the most popular up and coming genre for brands to invest in, with 14% of new advertisers running on one or more sports podcasts in Q2 - representing 463 brands in total. Sports was also the fourth most popular podcast genre across Gen Z and podcast listeners aged 25+, according to weekly insights from Edison Research.
In September, there was a large jump in fantasy sports ad spending during football season in the US. According to Magellan AI, ad spending for that category doubled between July and August and delivered $2.7m in by September 2022 which is a 116% increase from July.
“Fantasy sports peaked in September for the last three years,” said CEO of Magellan AI CEO Cameron Hendrix in a webinar, “Fantasy sports is one of those categories that we see patterns in, and those patterns repeat pretty strongly when we track this data.”
