Let’s see what this week’s numbers say about online advertising, shall we?
- Few marketers believe that ad loads in podcasts are too high, but listeners may not agree for much longer. After rising to a new high in Q4 2023, podcast ad loads climbed to yet another record during the first quarter of this year, according to Magellan AI’s latest quarterly benchmark report. During Q1, ad time on average was 8.36% of a podcast episode in the US, per the analysis. That’s up from the previous high of 7.68% in Q4 2023, and represents a considerable 50% year-over-year hike from 5.56% in Q1 2023. Close to 2% (1.94%) of the average podcast episode in Q1 was devoted to pod-on-pod ads – ads that promote other podcasts. The share of time dedicated to such ads rose from 1.47% in Q4 2023 and from 1.35% during Q1 2023. The remaining 6.42% of episode time was advertiser ad load, up only slightly from 6.21% in Q4, but marking a larger rise from 4.21% during the year-earlier period.
- Fully 84% of marketers around the world report being extremely or very confident in their ROI measurement capabilities, up from 69% who felt that way last year, according to Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report. However, this confidence in measurement (which may be separate from confidence in actual results) belies a separate finding in the report: only 38% of respondents say they evaluate the ROI of their marketing efforts by measuring holistically both traditional and digital media spending. Instead, most tend to measure either digital media spending ROI (34% share) or traditional media spending ROI (28%).
- Advertisers will spend an average of more than $500 per digital video viewer this year, almost 15 times the amount that they’ll spend per digital audio user, according to estimates released by EMARKETER. To arrive at these figures, EMARKETER examined ad spending forecasts for various major media, along with the number of monthly adult users of each medium. With digital video ad spending growing rapidly in the US, the research firm calculated that advertisers will spend an average of $504.50 this year per monthly adult user, topping the $420.30 per social media user and the $315.10 per traditional TV user.
- The majority of consumers around the world use an ad blocker or anti-tracking service on either their web browser or their mobile/cell phone, and that also holds for US consumers, according to data recently released by YouGov. An average of 40% of consumers surveyed across 48 markets said they don’t use any form of ad blocker or anti-tracking service, with a further tenth (9% share) not sure. Within the US, those figures stand at 41% and 13%, respectively.
