Magellan’s Jim Ballas Says Podcasting Is Winning More Ad Dollars As Measurement Improves.

Podcast advertising has regained momentum in 2026, and Magellan AI President of Measurement Jim Ballas says the gains are showing up across several of the indicators his company tracks — from advertiser spending and rates to the number of brands putting money into the medium.

“I think we’re back really strong,” Ballas said during an appearance on the “PodBiz” podcast. While he cautions that advertising remains cyclical and will inevitably have stronger and weaker quarters, he says podcasting appears to have moved beyond some of the softness that followed the pandemic-era surge. More importantly, Ballas sees podcasting becoming a more established piece of media plans rather than a channel advertisers quickly abandon when conditions deteriorate.

“You don’t get a fire sale when something bad happens necessarily,” he said. “We are just now a key part of every unit.”

Magellan reported last month that the top 15 advertisers it tracks each month have spent a combined $361 million on podcasting. Most months, the biggest spenders invest about $60 million into the medium.

Ballas believes some of 2026’s growth can be traced to the advertising technology that has developed around podcasting. Attribution has given marketers a better ability to demonstrate campaign performance, while brand-safety and brand-suitability technology has helped make companies more comfortable buying podcasts. At the same time, programmatic and targeted buying have opened podcasting to buyers accustomed to purchasing other forms of digital media.

“We’re probably at the best place we’ve been as an industry,” Ballas said. “Attribution is a huge part — making things look similar that we prove performance in this media like they do in other media”

He says that familiarity is helping podcasting tap budgets that previously may have gone elsewhere. “The technology has caused a lot of money to come in from places that might be used to buying programmatic display or television, and now they’re able to come into the audio space,” Ballas said.

Yet even as podcasting becomes easier for mainstream media buyers to buy and measure, Ballas says the definition of the medium itself is becoming harder to pin down. Nowhere is that change more obvious than video. After several years in which the podcast business talked about video as something coming over the horizon, Ballas says that transition is essentially complete. “It’s here. We’re in it,” he said.

Magellan measures YouTube in addition to traditional podcasts, including podcast simulcasts as well as other YouTube content. Ballas says the company has seen significant spending around video versions of some large podcasts during the past six months.

The economics may also create room for publishers to increase their advertising inventory. Ballas said Magellan’s data indicates that some shows among the roughly top 500 could, on average, support about one additional ad per episode based on current performance.

But he cautions that the calculation cannot simply be about squeezing another commercial into an episode. Publishers also need to watch consumption and audience behavior to make sure additional advertising does not undermine the listener relationship that made the show valuable in the first place.

The expansion of podcasting beyond audio is also changing how Magellan thinks about measurement itself. The company is making a broader push into multichannel measurement rather than looking at podcasts as an isolated channel. Its multi-touch attribution work now stretches across podcasts, streaming audio, some connected television and display advertising. And Magellan has added another traditional audio medium to the mix.

“We just launched broadcast radio attribution,” Ballas said. The idea is to give marketers a better picture of how audio performs as part of an overall campaign — something he believes has often been difficult under measurement systems built primarily around digital behavior.

Ballas says audio can get “the short end of the stick” in media mix models and other attribution systems that lean heavily on last-click behavior, since that is not how most audio advertising works. Magellan’s goal is to measure those channels together and “show the power of the whole mix,” Ballas said.

That approach also reflects the reality that consumers do not live inside the media silos that the advertising industry uses. The same is true from a marketer’s perspective. A consumer who encounters a brand through a podcast may also see its television advertising, hear it on radio or streaming audio, and encounter it through other digital channels before making a purchase. Better multichannel measurement, he says, can give advertisers a fuller view of frequency and the different touchpoints that ultimately contribute to a result.

For all the advances in technology and measurement, however, Ballas argues advertisers still make a fundamental mistake when they assume podcasting should behave like another medium simply because it can now be measured more like one “Don’t play a radio ad on the podcast,” he said. “Do it differently — it’s a much more high-impact, high-intent audience.”

He says marketers accustomed to search advertising can also bring unrealistic expectations about how quickly campaigns should generate measurable results.

“Treating it like you would treat search is a mistake, and treating it like it’s just radio is also a mistake,” he added. “Treating it as an independent channel, seeing its pros, being patient, and letting it mature is how you become a great steward of a brand’s dollars.”