Despite all the excitement surrounding podcast advertising, there's still untapped potential. Our analysis shows that only about 34% of podcasts analyzed have secured at least one sponsor, which suggests significant room for growth.
We wanted to break the figures down by format, country, and category to find where the biggest opportunities for sponsors are, and which heavily crowded spaces may be driving up ad rates.
Note: Our sponsor data skews toward active English-language shows averaging more than 250 weekly downloads.
🎙️ Podcasts that accept guests are more likely to attract sponsors
We also broke the figures down by podcast format and found that shows that take guests are significantly more likely to attract sponsorships than shows that do not [1].
Approximately 40% of podcasts that feature guests secure sponsorships, compared to just 25% of podcasts that do not. This gap points to an overlooked sponsorship opportunity among high-engagement podcasts without guest appearances, suggesting these podcasts might currently be undervalued by advertisers.
🔪 True Crime is the most under-monetized podcast category
We wanted to look at the categories where there is high listenership but low sponsorship penetration - i.e. the most under-monetized categories. For the analyzed shows, we found the summed total number of listeners and the percentage of sponsored shows and gave each category a “monetization opportunity” score, where a higher score means that category is more under-monetized.
We found that True Crime is the most under-monetized podcast category. Perhaps sponsors aren’t racing to sponsor True Crime shows for brand safety reasons linked to its gruesome content, or perhaps it’s just a missed opportunity.
We further assessed podcast sponsorship attractiveness based on three key metrics that brands may often check when deciding whether to partner with a show or not: Spotify followers, social reach, and engagement rates.
First we calculated the average for each of these metrics across all sponsored podcasts, then we compared it with all podcasts in each category. Podcasts at the average across these metrics received a "sponsorship attractiveness score" of 1.0, with higher scores signaling greater potential attractiveness to sponsors.
This chart shows that the Cricket category has the highest sponsorship attractiveness score, however, it has a low number of active shows.
True Crime stands out once again as a significant opportunity for advertisers, as not only did we find it to be the most under-monetized category, but it’s also among the top five most attractive categories when it comes to spotify follower numbers, engagement rate, and social reach.
🏈 Sports categories dominate when it comes to attracting sponsors
Interestingly, sports categories dominate when it comes to attracting sponsors. In fact, nine out of the ten most-sponsored podcast categories are sports-related. A striking 72% of Football podcasts analyzed are sponsored which indicates potential oversaturation and higher ad rates.
It has been previously reported that listeners of sports podcasts are more receptive to podcast ads than print and radio ads. Advertisers, especially the most prolific sports sponsors like Shopify, MintMobile, and AllState [2], are probably using this to maximize their return on investment.
Perhaps sports listeners are more affluent on average, or maybe sponsors want to reach their heavily male-skewing audiences.
We found that nine sports categories skew heavily male, six skew male, and one - running - is evenly split [4]. It’s likely that sponsors running brand advertising achieve better results by targeting audiences that are already segmented and tailoring their messaging accordingly.
🦘 Australian podcasts are less likely to attract sponsors than other anglophone countries
Next, we broke down the data by audience location and found that the proportion of sponsored podcasts varies across anglophone audiences.
Podcasts targeting audiences in Canada have a sponsorship rate of 39%, while those with an audience primarily based in Australia lag behind at 31% [3].
Interestingly, Australian listenership is actually higher than Canada’s, and not far behind the US, making it surprising that Australia comes in last. It may be that Australia’s smaller total population affects perceived ROI potential, yet this could point to untapped opportunities for sponsors aiming to reach a comparatively underserved English-speaking market.
Final thoughts
Podcast sponsorship has great growth potential, and advertisers can take advantage of this. Instead of focusing only on popular sports shows, brands could look into less explored areas, like the True Crime category, shows without guests, and shows that mainly target an audience in Australia.
Looking to book podcast ad spots? Try Rephonic for free and access listener numbers, audience demographics, sponsor data, contact info, and lots more for over three million shows.
Further Reading
Footnotes
[1] Rephonic uses AI to identify podcasts that accept guests and while it is usually very accurate, occasionally we may get it wrong.
[2] Calculated by the number of sponsored podcasts.
[3] We used the primary audience location to calculate these figures.
