Episode Details

This week in the business of podcasting:

• Podcast Week in New York opened with the Sounds Profitable Business Summit, where This American Life's Ira Glass argued that podcasts build deeper audience connections than influencer content and that the depth makes their advertising more effective. A later panel tackled Spotify's skip button test, with Right Side Up and Acast pushing the industry toward better ad quality and more transparency.
• Writing in The Roast, ADOPTER Media's Adam McNeal makes the case for pinning YouTube ad deals to "engaged views" rather than the platform's newly inflated public view count, arguing buyers should anchor contracts to the more meaningful metric while they still can.
• Spotify is expanding its Partner Program for podcasts to more than 35 new markets this fall, its largest geographic rollout yet, citing a 140% jump in video podcast consumption and working with hosts like Acast, Libsyn, and Omny so creators can opt in without switching distributors.
• At the IAB Podcast Upfront during Podcast Week, the IAB released a new video podcast measurement guide and argued a brand-new medium-agnostic framework like the AMP Accords is not needed, pointing buyers instead to existing IAB Tech Lab standards and clarifying which one applies where.
• Apple's fall operating systems bring a wide batch of new Apple Podcasts features across iOS 27, tvOS 27, and macOS 27, with video as the throughline: a redesigned Apple TV app, video playback on macOS, full transcripts and chapters, and a new Search in Show tool.

To find links to these, and every article covered in this week's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.