Comedy Dominates Podcast Budgets But Isn’t The ‘Safe Bet’ Advertisers Think.

Following the release by Oxford Road of a new tool to measure which podcasts have the greatest return on investment, the audio ad agency is focusing on one of the most-used gernes among brands — comedy. It has released a ranking of the shows that it calculates generate the biggest sales results using ORBIT, its Oxford Road Benchmark Intelligence Tool.

Oxford says the All Things Comedy Network series “Monday Morning Podcast” featuring host Bill Burr’s “rants” about relationship advice, sports and the illuminati, did better than all the rest. Comedian Dan Soder’s indie podcast “Soder” ranked second, followed by the iHeartPodcasts series “Emergency Intercom.”

The rankings are based on Oxford Road’s analysis of $1.6 billion in verified podcast spending across hundreds of advertisers during a 12-month period. ORBIT normalizes performance across different advertiser goals. It says that allows for a direct comparison across different campaign types and advertiser objectives. That normalized, goal-based data allows Oxford to make conclusions it says were impossible in the past. “This is what happened when real companies spent real money,” CEO Dan Granger says.

The analysis also questions whether advertisers should be putting so much money into the comedy category. It says it may have the biggest share of dollars, but as a genre, comedy is a ¨bottom tier¨ performer in the ORBIT rankings.

While the genre is soft overall, comedy podcasts also boast elite-tier performance. In fact, when Oxford released its debut ranker of overall podcasts last month, a third of the top 15 were comedy series. Its takeaway is that there are no guarantees in comedy performance. 

The agency says many brands gravitate toward comedy because they view it as safer than news or politics. But it warns that steering advertisers away from those genres may actually undermine campaign performance. Oxford argues that, given comedy’s inconsistent results, marketers should avoid treating it as a “safe default” and recognize that it’s a genre that demands real expertise to deliver strong outcomes.

Not all comedy advertisers are created equal. High-spend categories, like gambling and shopping, actually underperform while premium lifestyle brands excel,” says Oxford. It says the lesson from the data is comedy can offer a great ROI if there’s audience fit and marketers don’t overspend.

It even goes so far as to suggest some brands take the summer off, saying in three of the last four complete years (2021, 2023, 2024), third-quarter performance was the weakest. Instead, the agency suggests advertisers put the biggest share of dollars into the first quarter, where performance has historically been best. And then use the other quarters for incremental optimization.

Oxford Road expects to release new ORBIT rankings monthly, covering categories including genre-specific performance, international markets, emerging shows, and vertical-specific results. Each ranking draws from the company’s proprietary database of campaign outcomes across podcasting, streaming audio, terrestrial radio, and creator-based video.