Buyer beware: The sins of digital display and the reckoning of impression viewability are coming back to haunt the podcast advertising industry.
I stopped buying display advertising in 2016, and viewability was a big part of why. Advertisers had spent years buying impressions before it became evident that an ad being served didn’t mean a human ever had the opportunity to see it. Once that distinction became impossible to ignore, the market adapted in an “evolve or die” moment.
Now, podcasting is having its viewability moment. Spotify’s test of skippable podcast ads set off a predictable round of industry panic. For creators, the concern is the obvious one: If a listener can skip the ad, what is that impression worth?
As the founder of a media practice that has invested over $300 million in podcast advertising in the last eight years, the skip button itself isn’t what keeps me up at night. It’s the assumption underneath it: that an impression is a reasonable proxy for consumption. That assumption is eroding, and when buyers stop believing it, pricing follows.
We’ve seen this before
For anyone who worked in digital advertising in the early to mid-2010s, this should feel eerily familiar. Display advertising went through its own reckoning around viewability a decade ago.
When display viewability started gaining traction as a concept in 2011, the whole industry was convinced it would gut ad revenue. Then, advertisers and agencies started pushing for greater transparency and more rigid standards, organizations like the IAB and MRC got involved and new standards were eventually adopted. What changed was the buying mechanism and how inventory got priced, both for the better. The medium continued to grow.
Spotify’s moves around skippable ads are one piece of a larger picture. YouTube’s engaged view methodology is another. Add platform-specific definitions, different consumption behaviors and an increasingly fragmented listening and viewing ecosystem, and suddenly the word “impression” has lost all clarity.
We are taking inventory with materially different opportunities for consumption and, in most cases, asking advertisers to pay a flat CPM for it. That may have worked before the very first measurement standards existed, but it won’t cut it anymore.
Buyers are going to start asking harder questions
As Right Side Up begins planning for the upfront cycle, we’re asking partners for a level of platform transparency we haven’t historically required.
Audio versus video consumption is no longer enough. We need to understand where inventory is actually being delivered and how. An impression on one platform no longer represents the same opportunity for consumption as an impression somewhere else.
The industry needs to be careful here because publishers often push to project inventory as though all impressions remain interchangeable. If buyer expectations and actual audience behavior continue moving apart, we risk creating a bubble where inventory looks more valuable on paper than campaign performance eventually shows.
A unified consumption metric isn’t coming
The industry spent years standardizing around the download in part because it removed subjectivity. But platforms are now developing their own products, behaviors and measurement methodologies. We are moving even further away from a universal definition of consumption.
The more realistic goal is transparency, not uniformity. Tell buyers where impressions occurred. Tell us what the user could do with the ad. Tell us what engagement data exists. Give us enough information to understand what we are actually buying, or risk advertisers renewing at lower rates.
Creators should be paying attention
There is another constituency that needs to become much more involved in this conversation: creators.
Too many creators don’t have enough visibility into and understanding of how their inventory is sold, measured and monetized. If a creator is making a living from advertising, they should understand it and ideally have the ability to influence how their content is sold. That means knowing how their ads are being delivered and what constitutes an impression on distribution platforms, plus what data advertisers receive. And when platform decisions threaten the economics of their businesses, they should make their voices heard.
Podcasting is unusual because creators actually have enough influence to do that.
Advertisers have a responsibility here, too. If we want a healthy ecosystem, we can’t demand more accountability from publishers while refusing to give the market time to adapt. Better measurement and transparency should help us avoid an indiscriminate race to the bottom.
2027 should be the inflection point
When display advertising confronted viewability, the market didn’t transform overnight; it took years. But once advertisers and buyers started changing what we required from partners, the shift accelerated quickly, and it helped preserve the medium.
Going into 2027, podcast advertising buyers need to understand what kinds of impressions they’re getting, where they occurred and what opportunity the audience actually had to consume them.
Let’s not pretend every impression is equal because that makes planning easier. Let’s build a healthier marketplace where creators continue to be rewarded for building devoted audiences, publishers can defend the value they’re providing and advertisers fully understand what they’re buying.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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