Podscribe: Video Now In 79% Of Podcast Ad Campaigns, But Audio Still Performs Better.

Video has moved from an add-on to standard practice in podcast advertising. The latest Podscribe Performance Benchmark Report says 79% of all episodic campaigns it measured now include a video simulcast element, a sign that advertisers are increasingly buying podcasts as both audio and video products. And among those simulcast campaigns, YouTube accounts for nearly two-thirds of all impressions, making it the dominant video platform in the current podcast ad market.

“Podcasters are putting the ads in YouTube, and advertisers are buying them despite a lack of measurement,” CEO Pete Birsinger said during a webinar presenting the findings. “There’s a lot of confusion on what can be measured, what shows are accounted for, what shows have opted in, and what it means.”

As video is added to media plans, Podscribe says advertisers still should not assume those impressions behave the same way as traditional audio downloads. The data shows YouTube continues to drive weaker direct-response performance than audio on a per-impression basis.

 “As a consumer, I would expect that if I’m watching a podcast, the prime time to convert is while I’m watching the video,” Senior Director of Partnerships Camden Weber said. “But what we found was that YouTube was actually about 30% fewer promo code redemptions or post purchase survey results compared to their audio counterpart.”

Podscribe says part of the gap appears to come from who is actually watching. The report shows that the higher the percentage of a YouTube channel’s subscribers who are in the U.S., the stronger the conversion performance. “We see more than two-times the conversion rate, or promo code redemption rate, for pure U.S.-focused subscribers and podcasts compared to the redemption rate for those non-U.S. subscriber shows,” Weber explained. 

That international skew matters because many of the biggest video podcasts on YouTube attract substantial global audiences, which may be less useful to advertisers trying to drive U.S. commerce outcomes. In response, Podscribe has updated its simulcast model and now adjusts for U.S. versus non-U.S. audience mix, as well as ad placement within the episode, ad length, and, soon, the type of creative, including whether the ad is host-read and whether there is a visual element such as the product appearing on screen. Weber said the model update is intended to reflect how video impressions actually behave rather than simply valuing them the same as audio. 

Yet Podscribe is not presenting video as an underperforming sideshow. Rather, the company’s argument is that video is now a large enough share of podcast consumption and buying that advertisers need better tools to value it correctly. “There’s a lot of confusion on everybody’s part on what can be measured, what shows are accounted for, and what shows have opted in,” Birsinger said.

The same issue is now surfacing on Spotify, where video adoption is still relatively limited but is creating what Podscribe describes as a new attribution blind spot for baked-in ads. The report says 13% of the top 100 shows it tracks are opted into Spotify Video, rising to 16% of the top 500 shows. But dynamically inserted ads on Spotify video are often harder to track because advertisers cannot always access the same level of pixel-based attribution used for traditional podcast downloads. That limitation means measurement firms must estimate the missing data when evaluating campaign performance across platforms.

“If a show decides to distribute its content on Spotify video, none of the baked-in ad content can be measured regardless if somebody on Spotify watches it on audio or video,” Birsinger said. “So in effect, it creates a measurement black hole.”

That does not mean all Spotify inventory disappears from view. The report says non-Spotify listening for shows that have opted into Spotify Video — such as listening on Apple Podcasts — can still be pixeled as usual. And opted-in publishers can integrate with Podscribe to pass back Spotify play counts so the company can count those listens toward reporting and modeling. The report also notes that some Megaphone publishers may be able to pixel dynamically inserted Spotify video ads, with broader availability expected to expand.

But Birsinger said that modeling is a workaround, not the end goal. “The main goal isn’t to actually just get better modeling,” he said. “The main goal is to actually get real measurement from YouTube.”

As Apple Podcasts looks to add video through HLS in the coming weeks, Podscribe says it can likely be pixeled and attributed in all the usual ways, avoiding the kind of baked-in measurement loss now associated with Spotify Video.

Download the latest PPB report HERE.