Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines

Podcasting remains a rapidly growing industry, with ad revenues ballooning over the last few years to reach a projected estimate of nearly $1 billion in the US for 2020 (14% y/y growth), according to the IAB Podcast Advertising Revenue Study conducted by PwC. And that’s despite softened projections tied to impacts from COVID-19 which had previous estimates expected to reach 29% year-over-year growth.

In 2019 annual podcast revenue estimates reached $708 million with a whopping 48% increase over reported revenues from the previous year. Podcast listeners are highly engaged and growing as a whole which makes them an appealing target for marketers. However, historically a number of challenges have endured in getting a commonly agreed-upon set of metrics in the podcasting space. This is in part due to the lack of access to client side measurement, but also largely due to podcasting being a relatively new space that has been innovating over the past few years.

The IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines 2.1 are the result of the Podcast Technical Working Group’s efforts to provide clarity in the marketplace by developing a common language around measurement. The focus of this document is on server side measurement (but will be extended to client side measurement once the client side opens up). In addition to defining standard metrics for both podcast content and podcast ads, this document also provides guidance on some of the technical details such as request filtering, in order to reduce the discrepancies currently seen across podcast publishers and tech vendors.