Podcast Buying Evolves As Creators Build Cross-Platform Brands.

Podcast advertisers are increasingly looking beyond RSS downloads when deciding where to spend their money, according to Acast Managing Director of U.S. Sales Ricardo Neto, who says creators’ influence across YouTube, social media, video and live events has become just as important as the size of their podcast audience.

Speaking on the PodBiz podcast, Neto said podcasting has evolved from a business largely supported by direct-response marketers into one attracting a growing share of major brand advertisers. As those budgets increase, he said, buyers are taking two distinct approaches: using sophisticated audience targeting to reach consumers at scale while also embracing creators as influencers capable of extending campaigns well beyond a traditional podcast ad.

“For Acast, our business is really growing in two different ways,” Neto said. One is through advertisers buying “targeted audiences at scale” using advanced targeting, third-party measurement and brand safety tools. The other is the “host as influencer” movement. “The definition of podcast has changed from just this traditional RSS experience to now social and video and experiential,” Neto said.

That shift is also changing how Acast decides which creators it wants to represent. For years, podcast companies largely judged creators by one metric: RSS downloads. Today, Neto said, that no longer provides a complete picture.

“We used to just evaluate RSS,” he said. “That was kind of the currency in which we evaluated talent.”

Now, Acast looks at a creator’s overall influence, including YouTube audiences, social media reach and other platforms where fans engage with their content.

“We’re evaluating influence,” Neto said, explaining that creators who might once have been overlooked because of modest RSS numbers are now attracting attention because of the communities they’ve built elsewhere online.

The result is a broader definition of what constitutes a successful podcast creator — one that reflects how audiences increasingly consume content across multiple platforms rather than through audio alone.

That broader perspective is also reshaping media buying. For years, brands largely concentrated their podcast budgets on the industry’s biggest shows. Neto believes that strategy overlooks podcasting’s strength of offering highly engaged niche communities.

“We’ve seen for a really long time that the buying behavior in the U.S. has been very scale-driven,” he said. But the data says that people are more engaged with smaller shows than they are with big shows. Neto argued that listeners often form stronger identities around niche podcasts than around mass-market hits, creating communities that can deliver better advertising performance despite having smaller audiences.

That has led Acast to focus more attention on what Neto described as an under-monetized segment of the industry. Rather than steering every advertiser toward the largest podcasts, the company increasingly recommends mid-tier creators with loyal followings and strong influence beyond their RSS feeds.

Some of those creators generate around 50,000 weekly downloads, Neto said, but become far more valuable once advertisers consider their social audiences and overall creator brand. As more brands produce successful campaigns with those creators, he expects additional advertising dollars to follow.

Ads Grow Into Broader Partnerships

The changing role of creators is also transforming the relationship between brands and podcasters. Rather than stopping with host-read commercials, Neto said successful campaigns increasingly evolve into much broader partnerships.

A brand might begin by buying traditional podcast ads before expanding into branded segments, product placement within video simulcasts or sponsorship of live tours and events.

“We see it all the time,” Neto said. But he said those relationships only work when they feel authentic to listeners. “We’re not trying to square peg round hole it,” he said. “We want it to be authentic. We want it to be real.”

Listeners, Neto added, can quickly recognize when a partnership genuinely fits a creator — and when it doesn’t — and that authenticity ultimately shows up in campaign performance.

Even as podcasting broadens onto more platforms, Neto does not believe video changes the medium’s fundamental identity. Instead, he sees video primarily as a discovery tool that introduces new audiences to podcasts, particularly younger consumers, while allowing creators to choose how much — or how little — they want to embrace cameras.

“We view video as an extension,” he said. “If a podcast needs to be seen, if it can’t live on its own with just audio, maybe it’s not a podcast.”