The US podcast ad market hit $1 billion for the first-time last year due to the rise of dynamic ad insertion (DAI). Podcasting is now one of the fastest-growing digital media channels, growing twice as fast as internet advertising and its revenue will reach $2 billion this year and $4 billion by 2024, according to a report by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
More people are listening to podcasts, which logically drives an increase in the advertising demand across categories. However, there has also been an increase in automated advertisements delivery, especially DAI.
By using DAI, advertisers can serve ads as soon as a podcast episode is downloaded, rather than producing the whole podcast – ads and all – as a single audio file that cannot be modified.
As compared with other digital channels, podcast advertising adoption of brand safety and suitability solutions remains low. Only 44% of publishers reported using brand safety solutions, and just 33% are using brand suitability solutions.
In the near term, only 6% of publishers plan to implement brand safety solutions, rising slightly to 11% for brand suitability tools.
IAB is exploring a standard way of parsing and reading text for brand safety and suitability.