Podcast Movement 2026 Keynotes, Australia's Advertising Growth, & More

0:00This is the download recap from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I'm Gavin Gattis, the download recap is brought to you by PodScribe, you can find out more at podScribe.com. Now, let's get into this week's news. The Stars of Podcast Movement by Tom Webster. Podcast Movement returns to New York on September 17th and 18th at Terminal 5 with Sounds Profitable's Tom Webster running through the keynote lineup worth planning around. He opens Thursday with the podcast landscape 2026, the fourth annual edition of the study, this year drawing on more than 5,400 consumers. He teases a genuinely surprising headline finding that for the first time, Apple has fallen out of the top three podcast platforms, displaced by an unexpected competitor, a shift to

1:02frames as a sea change in how the industry talks about what it does. The rest of the stage leans towards creators and platforms. Sirius XM Media's Greg Leiter joins John Mr. Ballin Allen on turning fandom into a multi-platform brand across YouTube, podcast, social, and live shows without losing audience trust. Ariel Nissenblad and Lauren Pasel bring their crowdsource session WTF is a podcast in 2026, built from attendee interviews from earlier in the conference on how people actually discover and consume shows. And head of product for YouTube podcast Steve McLendon closes the keynotes with a look at new audio first listening features and tools, returning long episodes into clips. YouTube just did us a huge favor. YouTube's recent change in how it publicly counts views has thrown fresh confusion into podcast

2:03measurement and Oxford Road CEO and founder Dan Granger argues that might be exactly what the industry needed. By stirring the pot, YouTube is inadvertently proving why podcasting needs cross-platform measurement it can actually trust. Bumper co-founder Dan Misener ran the numbers and found the new metric, the public view counts nearly double what the old one did, meaning a show can appear to have roughly twice the plays overnight with no change in actual listening. A share takeaway is simple. When a single platform can redefine a core metric on a whim, creators and advertisers are reminded how important consistent industry-wide standards can be. Granger, speaking on his LinkedIn page, said the shift felt like, quote, a kick in the pants, at first, but the resulting chaos makes the case for standardization better than any pitch deck could. Misener's bumper analysis puts hard numbers up to the confusion because YouTube now counts the view the moment the playback starts rather than after meaningful engagement. The same show can report close to double its previous you count with no actual change in audience.

3:07For advertisers trying to line a YouTube figure up against downloads or streams numbers, the takeaway is that cross-platform comparisons only hold when everyone agrees on what is being counted. Australian Internet advertising records strongest growth in four years, reaching 19.8 billion dollars in financial year 2026. As the headline says, Australia's Internet advertising market grew 14% year over year in the financial year, it's strongest ever since 2022. Or according to IAB Australia, audio climbed 6.6% to $353 million AUD and podcasting led the way inside that number, rising 10.1% and now accounting for 40% of all audio spend. Podcast advertising also set a fresh quarterly record of 40 million dollars in the June 2026 quarter, which is up 13.1% year over year. IAB Australia CEO Guy LaRoy accredited much of the

4:14momentum to always on rather than campaign cycle spending with small and median businesses, retailers, and overseas advertisers all putting more money into the channel. The growth comes with a caution from the same body. In its future of measurement review, IAB Australia argues that the industry's biggest gap is not a shortage of measurement methods, but a lack of shared data standards. The report found strong confidence in measuring individual channels, yet far weaker confidence engaging their collective impact with cross-media audience measurement flagged as the largest unresolved problem with channel-specific currencies that still operate in silos. Its central recommendation is to adopt a common campaign data taxonomy, potentially adapting IAB United States campaign data standards 1.0 rather than building something new and to harmonize metrics and definitions across data sets. Now it's time for quick hits. These are articles that didn't fit into the top story section

5:16this week, but are still worth including in a weekend reading. First up, Ariel Nissen Blatt's trailer park, the podcast trailer podcast, is launching a three-part mini-series built on Coleman Insights research into what makes a trailer work, drawing on a study of 500 US listeners reacting to four real trailers, and in that study authenticity up-performed slick production in three of the four tests. Netflix is adding podcasts from Cat Williams, Harlan Cobin, and Stephanie Sue while renewing originals, including Murder with My Husband and The Pete Davidson Show, a sign of deeper investment in an audio alongside its video business that's from the Hollywood Reporter. EarMax Media co-founder Andy Maxwell argues podcast advertisers should look past cheap reach and low CPMs, prioritizing conversions brand affinity, and tightly engage niche communities over raw scale. And finally, YouTube is teaming up with variety on an inaugural creator festival at the Toronto International

6:16Film Festival, where creators including Mark Vins, Zeeway, and Andrew Ray will debut exclusive video content on the platform. That wraps it up for this week's Download Recap. You can find links to everything I just talked about by clicking the link in your show notes to go to today's episode post on our site, where we have everything, and you can subscribe to the newsletter version to get it sent to your inbox every week. As usual, I'm Gavin Gattis here for Sounds Proffable and pod scribe our producers are myself Tom Webster, Brian Berletta, and Molly Demilier. And as usual, thanks to you, for sticking with me as I brought you the top stories you might have missed from this week in the business of podcasting. Robot?