The $2.86 Billion Pool: Why Everyone's Fighting Over the Same Ad Dollars

Reid MercerTwo point eight six billion dollars. That's what US podcast advertising pulled in in twenty twenty-five, up seventeen point six percent from the year before, per the IAB and PwC's Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Cool. Everybody go home happy. Except I'm Reid Mercer, and this is the show where I take numbers like that apart before anyone gets to celebrate, because a headline growth rate can hide a concentration story, and that's exactly the test I wanna run today. Same pool of dollars, same pool of buyers. Question is whether that seventeen point six is spread evenly across the market or whether it's stacked on a handful of premium slots while everyone else fights for scraps. I've got four things on my desk this week that all point at the same tension: a live commerce company suddenly worth real money, a network locking up exclusive political talent, and a lineup of advertisers you would not expect anywhere near a microphone. That number sounds like a rising tide. Let's find out if it's actually one or if it's just getting deeper in one corner of the pool. A decade before that number, podcast ad revenue barely cleared a hundred and five million dollars total. That's not a typo. TV News Check ran that stat right next to the new figure, like a before and after photo. It's the look how far we've come slide every deck in this industry has been building toward for ten years. But growth from a tiny base is easy. The real test is the shape of the growth now. Axis Intelligence broke down the full year numbers, and podcasting is now thirty-four point one percent of the eight point four billion dollar US digital audio market, up from thirty-two point zero percent the year before. Meanwhile, digital audio overall, the whole category podcasting sits inside, only grew ten point two percent. Wait, hold on. Podcasting's slice of the pie grew faster than the pie itself? Yeah. Radio Ink flagged that ten point two percent digital audio number in their writeup of the report, and it tells you podcasting isn't just riding a tide, it's eating share from display and streaming audio inside its own category. Encouraging if you sell podcast ads. Less encouraging if you're trying to figure out whether every seat at the table is getting richer because CPMs are where the story splits wide open. Axis has published host-read rates running twenty-four to twenty-six dollars for a sixty-second spot. Programmatic inventory on the same platforms, twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. So a host-read spot is worth about double a programmatic one, sometimes more. Picture a network with a hundred shows. Ten of them are hand-sold, host-read, sponsors love them. Ninety are filling avails through an exchange at half the rate. That's not one industry growing. That's two industries wearing the same name tag. So which one is actually driving the number? Is the premium tier pulling the average up while the programmatic tail treads water? Or is this genuinely broad-based? Nobody's published that split cleanly, which is annoying because it's the only number that tells you where to point a sales team. If you're building out a sales team right now, that ambiguity is expensive. You either bet the whole roster looks like the ten host-read shows, or you assume the ninety in the exchange are just going to keep floating along. And you can't just declare a show premium and expect the rate to follow. Advertisers pay the host-read premium because they trust a specific voice, not because a network says so. So the real strategic question isn't the growth rate at all. It's how many of those trusted voices a network can actually develop before the economics stop scaling. That's not a number any of these reports are tracking yet, and it's exactly the kind of gap a sales team ignores at its own risk. And that CPM gap matters a lot more once you look at where shopper attention is actually going this year because a meaningful chunk of it isn't going to audio at all. Okay, here's the number that made my group chat blow up in August. Whatnot closed a five hundred and forty-five million dollar round. Tubefilter called it the largest raise live shopping has ever seen, and the valuation lands at twenty billion dollars. Twenty billion for a live stream auction app. Wait, say that again slower. Twenty billion, up from just under half that less than a year earlier. That's the pace we're talking about. And CNBC's writeup on the round put a number on the category itself. They sized live commerce at north of twenty-two billion dollars total. Whatnot alone is claiming something like sixty percent of that pool. Sixty percent, one company owning six out of every ten dollars in a twenty-two billion dollar market. Think about that against a radio ad budget or a regional cable buy. That's not a niche anymore. That's a format eating other formats' lunch. So why do people actually watch this stuff? I went down a rabbit hole trying to answer that. There was a Vox podcast episode a few weeks back that got into the psychology of it: card breaks, live auctions, that whole world. Their argument was basically that the format works like a gambling loop. You don't know what you're getting, the countdown clock creates urgency, and the dopamine hit resets every few minutes. That's uncomfortably close to how a slot machine is designed, and it explains why people stay in these streams for hours. I mean, I've watched a friend buy a box of trading cards live on camera at eleven at night for reasons he could not explain to me the next morning. Right, exactly that. So here's the open question I can't shake. Is live commerce actually competing with audio for the same ad dollars and the same eyeball hours? Or is it something adjacent that the smart networks should just be building into their own portfolio instead of watching from the outside? Because if a twenty-two billion dollar live commerce market is pulling younger, high-intent shoppers away from a podcast feed, that's attention audio doesn't get back. And if that's true alongside a CPM structure where the premium end is already pulling away from the programmatic end, you've basically got two pressures pointing the same direction. And wait, those two threads actually crash into each other in one deal. It landed in August, same month as the Whatnot round, and it tells you exactly where the networks think the real money's going. It's an exclusive talent deal, not a platform play, which if you're keeping score, says a lot about who's actually scared of who. Okay, the deal. Audacy signed on as the exclusive audio sales and distribution partner for the MeidasTouch Network, effective September first, twenty twenty-six. Radio Ink. broke that on August nineteenth. Exclusive. Not a syndication slot, not a rev share test, the whole sales and distribution pipe. And it wasn't a standalone signing either. Radio Ink. reported the deal landed alongside MeidasTouch closing its first outside funding round ever. Plus, a former CBS correspondent coming on as chief Washington correspondent. So in one window, funding, marquee hire, exclusive network deal, MeidasTouch goes from scrappy political show to something that looks like an institution. Why would Audacy want exclusivity on that? And why now? Here's my read, and I want to be honest that it's a read, not something the reporting states outright. Audacy didn't say we're locking this down because the middle of the CPM stack is getting squeezed. Nobody put that sentence in a press release. But look at the shape of it. You've got a network paying up for exclusivity on a fast-growing political show right as ad buyers are chasing a shrinking set of premium slots. That's not proof of a defensive motive. It's a pattern that rhymes with one. I spent two years on the buy side reading decks that swore every acquisition was strategic, so forgive me for wanting the actual math before I call this a hedge. Still, connect it to what we already laid out. One thread said the premium end of this market commands a real premium over the programmatic end. The other thread said attention is drifting toward formats that aren't audio at all. Put those next to an exclusivity grab for scarce political talent, and you get one story, not three. Growth in this business isn't lifting every show. It's pooling around whoever owns the name people actually search for. MeidasTouch, Whatnot. Same underlying bet. Control the scarce thing, whether that's a face or a format. Everybody's chasing scarcity and calling it strategy. Which, fine, that's what companies do. But it means the middle of the market, the shows without a marquee name or a live shopping hook, are the ones absorbing whatever pressure this creates. And that pressure doesn't stay invisible for long. If you're a mid-tier show without a marquee host, you start seeing your renewal rates get squeezed even though the trade press keeps printing a healthy growth number. That's the disconnect that should worry anyone selling ad inventory right now. The aggregate number keeps climbing while the deals that actually get done keep concentrating in fewer hands. I don't think that's a conspiracy. I think it's just what happens when buyers have more dollars to spend than they have confidence about where to spend them. They default to the name they already trust. Which, again, is a read, not a stat anyone's published. But it's the same logic driving every one of these deals this year. And if Audacy is playing defense with an exclusive lock on premium talent, that only gets more interesting once you see who else wants a seat at that same table. Because it's not just other podcast networks. We're talking a cable news operation, an HR conference, and I promise I'm not making this up, a transit agency, all showing up to bid on the same narrow strip of premium inventory that MeidasTouch just got locked into. Everybody's late to the same party, and there are fewer good seats than the invite list suggests. Okay, so who else showed up to this land grab uninvited? Because I went looking, and it's a weirder guest list than I expected. Fox News announced a new show called The Girls. The Hollywood Reporter said it's an all-female roundtable with a rotating lineup, and one of the names joining as a Fox contributor is Melissa DeRosa. She was an aide to Andrew Cuomo. A cable news operation launching a talent-driven roundtable right after a radio group locks up an exclusive politics deal? That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. And it gets stranger. A GlobeNewswire release said HR Tech has tapped WRKdefined as the official podcast network for its event next month, with more than a dozen shows recording live from the expo floor at Mandalay Bay. An HR conference running a podcast network out of Las Vegas? Sure, why not? Then there's OmniRide. That's a transit agency. And Potomac Local reported they just started their own show called Insider. A bus company has a podcast now. We've officially entered the phase where every organization on Earth thinks it needs a feed. You want the funny part? None of this is really about content. It's about inventory. Every one of these is a new seller walking into the same buyer pool. And it's not just a domestic problem. Podcasts are becoming a real way to reach Gen Z in Germany too. Usage is climbing, and the ad market there is expanding right alongside it. That's actually the interesting wrinkle in all this. Everywhere else in this episode, growth and concentration are pulling in opposite directions. In Germany, at least on this read, they're not. The audience is genuinely getting bigger, which tells me the dilution problem isn't really about podcasting running out of listeners. There's clearly more room on the demand side, especially with younger audiences internationally. The dilution problem is entirely a supply and pricing problem. Too many sellers showing up at once, chasing a top tier that isn't expanding nearly as fast as the guest list is. So the format's pulling in new listeners globally at the exact moment supply is exploding domestically. Picture a highway on-ramp with three new lanes merging during rush hour. Here's the math problem nobody's pricing in. A transit agency and an HR trade show launching the same month a cable network stitches together a political talent play. That's non-endemic supply flooding the market right when the premium tier is already pulling away from everything else. The growth story isn't broken. The risk is that the CPM math advertisers built their budgets on gets diluted because buyers can't tell a bus agency's inventory from a network's flagship show just by looking at a download count. So you've got a pool that keeps getting bigger on paper, a top tier that keeps getting tighter and pricier, and a wave of new entrants who think they're buying into the first number instead of the second one. That's the whole shape of this thing. Growth up top, concentration at the top, and a crowd rushing in that priced the wrong tier entirely. So that's where the money's actually going. Not evenly. Into fewer seats. If you're pricing inventory off that top-line growth number alone, you're gonna get burned. Here's the thing I keep circling back to. Every one of these threads, the CPM split, the live commerce money, the exclusive talent deal, the new entrants, is really the same story told four different ways. Growth concentrating instead of spreading. None of that means the category's in trouble. It means the easy read, the number went up, therefore we're all fine, stops working the moment you look at who's actually capturing that upside. Worth remembering next time someone hands you a headline growth stat and expects you to nod along. Do me a favor. Forward this one to whoever on your team still thinks a rising category means rising CPMs for everybody. They need the concentration story, not the headline. And if you've got tips, deal intel, something I should be poking at next week, send it to thedownload at heymato.com. I read everything that lands there. Same shrinking room, a lot more people trying to get in the door. Talk soon.