Podcast ad revenue crossed $2.9 billion in 2025, while the broader audio category held steady growth, but new IAB/PwC data points to an AI-driven disruption in digital discovery that could reshape how audio advertising reaches listeners in the years ahead.
The 2025 IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and conducted by PwC Advisory Services, found that overall digital audio, a category encompassing podcasts, streaming music, and streaming radio, reached $8.4 billion in 2025, a 10.2% year-over-year gain from $7.6 billion in 2024. That compares to 8.5% growth the prior year.
However, the format’s share of total internet advertising revenue held at 2.8%, unchanged from 2022 levels, as faster-growing formats captured incremental spend. In a competitive context, audio’s 10.2% digital growth outpaced display’s 9.8% gain but trailed digital video (25.4%) and social media (32.6%). Internet advertising overall grew 13.9%.
Podcast advertising grew 17.6% year over year in 2025, reaching $2.862 billion, extending a decade-long run from $105.7 million in 2015. Growth has decelerated from a 72% spike in 2021 and a 26% gain in 2022, but the category has maintained consistent double-digit expansion in four of the past five years.
The report flags that its podcast figures reflect the traditional, audio-based definition and that the definition is rapidly expanding as video becomes the leading channel for podcast consumption. Roughly 71% of US podcast creators now produce video versions of their shows, according to Sounds Profitable research cited in the report, creating new questions about how podcast revenue will be classified and measured going forward.
Within the cross-media view derived from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook, the combined “music, radio and podcast” category, which bundles digital and non-digital revenue across all three, grew 1.3% in 2025. The report does not break out AM/FM broadcast radio as a standalone advertising revenue line.
Outside of podcast ad dollars’ potential shift away from audio, the report’s AI findings carry direct implications for audio’s advertiser value proposition.
Large language models are shifting consumer product discovery away from keyword search toward conversational interfaces, reducing open-web referral traffic and compressing the visibility of publisher and broadcaster properties that historically benefited from search-driven discovery. The report describes this as a structural shift requiring brands to pursue what it terms Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization alongside traditional search strategies.
Nielsen Chief Client Officer Peter Naylor tied that shift directly to audio’s longer-term opportunity. “We anticipate a world where [AI] agents are going to be deployed by consumers. And that means marketers will deploy agents to meet the consumer’s agents. A future of agent-to-agent transactions seems to be coming fast. When that happens, my personal belief is that you will see the rise in branding all over again. Marketers will work out how they can create more emotion with people, so that when they prompt, they prompt for their brand.”
