Podcast Revenue Soars 50% In Q3 As SiriusXM Builds Cross-Platform Ad Growth.

SiriusXM’s podcast network continues to be its biggest growth engine, helping lift overall ad sales as the company posted steady third-quarter results and raised full-year guidance. CEO Jennifer Witz told investors Thursday that the podcast segment is “booming,” with revenue up nearly 50% year-over-year during the third quarter.

“It is representing a larger portion of our overall ad revenue, and we would expect that to continue,” Witz said. “But we do have opportunities to improve on the streaming side and on the satellite side, as we are able to sell better across our platforms — we’re just launching now a unified buying process, so we’d expect to see some tailwinds there.” The company says it continues to see growth in advertisers buying across two or more of our platforms, which it says reflects the growing success of a multi-platform reach strategy.

SiriusXM Media now reaches 170 million monthly podcast listeners and it sees new deals and partnerships as a way to continue growing that audience. This week it inked a deal with John Allen, known to fans as MrBallen, to move his popular series “The MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories” to SiriusXM on Nov. 1. The deal also includes MrBallen’s hit YouTube channel, which boasts millions of subscribers and billions of views.

“This deal underscores our ability to support creators by growing podcast monetization across all platforms,” Witz said. “We are leveraging our broader network to take the podcasting tailwind and help brands find their audiences across Pandora and SiriusXM, bringing more ad dollars to both platforms.”

SiriusXM reports total ad revenue rose 1% to $455 million during the third quarter, saying programmatic and cross-platform buying trends continued to strengthen. CFO Tom Barry said programmatic sales were “up year-over-year,” and podcast growth helped offset declines in its streaming music business.

Pandora posted declines in both users and subscribers during third quarter. The company says it had 41.6 million monthly active users during Q3, a 5% decline from a year earlier — or a drop of 2.2 million. And on the paid user side, Pandora had 5.7 million subscribers in Q3, down from 5.9 million a year earlier.

“We continue to anticipate some headwinds in the fourth quarter from reduced streaming marketing,” Barry told analysts during a conference call.

For Q3, SiriusXM reported $2.16 billion in total revenue, down 1% year-over-year. Subscriber revenue declined slightly amid a modest drop in self-pay subscribers, while its churn rate for satellite radio improved. SiriusXM ended the quarter with 33 million satellite radio subscribers.

On the pricing and packaging front, SiriusXM began the quarter with the launch of SiriusXM Play, a new lower-cost, ad-supported subscription plan. It didn’t release any results for how many people have signed up for that option, however.

“We are seeing positive early indicators from the limited targeted marketing efforts we rolled out in tandem with the launch,” Witz said. “There is no evidence of cannibalization of our existing full price population with the introduction of this new tier, in fact, within the test population, we are driving interest and subscriptions across all our packages, effectively widening the top of the funnel.”

Witz said that SiriusXM is making “good progress” in its push to refocus the company on its core satellite radio business. SiriusXM is also preparing to launch addressable in-car advertising in early 2026, part of a broader strategy to “own the digital in-car ad experience” through 360L, CarPlay, and Android Auto integrations.