The two biggest items from mid-November don’t quite agree with each other, and that disagreement is the real story. One signals that podcasting’s biggest prize now belongs to whoever builds the most devoted global audience, not whoever has the biggest American media machine behind them. The other is a reminder that even that machine — iHeart, coming off a $174 million podcast quarter — can’t fully convince the market it isn’t for sale. Underneath both, a Q3 ad-spend report and a radio columnist’s eulogy for a department store point at the same quieter truth: the money keeps chasing scale, but the value an independent show can still own is the part scale can’t buy.
The World’s Biggest Video Podcast Isn’t American Anymore
Joe Rogan held the title of most-subscribed video podcast on earth for years. Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO took it from him this month, climbing to 21.9 million subscribers against Rogan’s 21.1 million. Neither is actually in first place. Figuring Out with Raj Shamani, made in India and launched in 2021, has passed both of them with 22.1 million.
What changed isn’t really the rankings — it’s what the rankings now measure. Shamani built his audience outside the US/UK media gravity that has defined “podcasting” for most of this industry’s history, landing guests like Emmanuel Macron, Scott Galloway, and Sam Altman along the way. He’s since signed with talent agency WME, the kind of deal that used to be reserved for shows built inside that gravity.
For an independent show in Tennessee, the number itself means nothing directly — nobody here is competing with a 22-million-subscriber show for guests or ad dollars. What it says is more useful: the audience and the money no longer have to start in New York or London. A loyal audience built somewhere else, on its own terms, can out-earn the old gatekeepers’ shows. That’s the same bet every small, local show is already making, just at a different scale.
Read the full story at Podnews.
iHeart Says It’s Not For Sale. The Market Isn’t So Sure.
Bloomberg reported that iHeart is exploring selling part or all of its podcast business, citing talks with an investment bank. iHeart’s response was a flat denial: no plan to sell. The timing is odd either way — the division just posted $174 million in quarterly revenue, up 24.6% year-on-year, and CEO Bob Pittman used this week’s earnings call to announce iHeart will start reporting podcasting as its own segment, separate from its Digital Audio Group, specifically so investors can see its value more clearly. That’s not the kind of move a company makes right before selling the thing.
And yet iHeart’s shares lost two-thirds of their value this week, even as they rallied slightly on the sale rumor itself. Earlier this year, Bloomberg had already reported iHeart was in merger talks with SiriusXM. Something is unsettled at one of the largest podcast networks in the country, even if nobody involved will say what.
What this means for your show: if your distribution, sales, or affiliate relationship touches a major network, instability at the top is worth tracking even while nothing is confirmed. There’s nothing to act on yet — but don’t be surprised if the ownership picture around one of the big networks looks different in a few months.
Read the full story at Podnews.
What Advertisers Are Actually Paying For, By the Numbers
Magellan AI’s Q3 benchmark report, built from more than 100,000 podcast episodes, shows ad spend still growing — up 18% year-over-year. That’s real growth, but it’s noticeably slower than the 26% year-over-year growth Magellan measured in the same quarter a year earlier. The money is still coming into podcasting; it’s just coming in less quickly than it was.
Where it’s going matters more than the headline number. Grocery is the fastest-growing advertising category, up 42% from the previous year. Financial Services spends the most of any category outright — $110.9 million in the quarter, up 27% year-over-year, spread across 652 different brands. And True Crime, unsurprisingly for anyone who’s made one, carries the heaviest ad load of any genre as a share of episode content.
What this means for your show: if you’re pitching sponsors directly, this is a map of where budgets are actually expanding. A grocery or financial-services brand is a better cold pitch right now than a category growing more slowly, regardless of how large that category’s total spend looks on paper.
Read the full story at RAIN News.
What a Dying Department Store Chain Can Teach a Podcaster
James Cridland’s column this week isn’t about podcasting on its surface. It’s about David Jones, a 188-year-old Australian department store chain now in administration and closing most of its stores. His point: David Jones just sold other people’s stuff, available cheaper and more conveniently elsewhere, and the only reason anyone still walked in was the knowledgeable staff who knew the shoppers by name. Once cost-cutting removed the people, there was no reason left to visit.
Cridland draws the same line through music radio — a format that, at its emptiest, just plays songs you can already stream yourself, and whose real edge was always the local presenters who knew their listeners. Cut the people to save money, and what’s left is a station running on automatic.
It’s the same bet a local podcast network is already making, just stated plainly: the content itself — the interview format, the episode structure, the feed — isn’t the differentiator. Anyone can replicate the format. What a platform or an algorithm can’t replicate is a host a listener actually knows, talking about the place they actually live. That’s the part worth protecting when a budget gets tight, not the part to cut first.
Read the full story at RAIN News.
None of this week’s news is really about podcasting’s health — it’s about where the value sits as the industry gets bigger and more consolidated. Ad money is still growing, just not as fast as it was; the audience ceiling keeps rising for shows built outside the old centers of gravity; and the biggest networks are still shaky even while insisting otherwise. If there’s a single thread here, it’s that scale and money are chasing platforms and categories, while the thing that actually keeps a listener coming back — a host who knows them — still belongs to the smaller shows that never had scale to begin with.