The podcast impression is breaking down

Podcasting is having its display-era viewability moment. Spotify's test of skippable podcast ads set off a predictable panic, but the authors of this AdExchanger opinion piece, Krystina Rubino (GM, Offline & Audio) and Lindsay Piper Shaw (Director, Offline & Audio) at Right Side Up, argue the skip button is not the real threat: "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." Their firm has invested over $300 million in podcast advertising in eight years. The parallel they draw is explicit: display went through this reckoning a decade ago, the IAB and Media Rating Council eventually set viewability standards, and "the medium continued to grow" because the buying mechanism and pricing changed. What breaks down now, they argue, is the flat CPM: the industry is "taking inventory with materially different opportunities for consumption and, in most cases, asking advertisers to pay a flat CPM for it." Publishers are the ones projecting impressions as interchangeable, and that is the bubble risk. A unified consumption metric, they concede, is not coming: the realistic goal is transparency, not uniformity.

The crux

The unit of value in podcast advertising is shifting from "an impression was served" to "a human actually heard it," and publishers who keep selling every impression as interchangeable are the ones who lose when buyers stop believing the proxy.

Sell-side read

Podcast and audio publishers should get ahead of the buyer's next question by volunteering where impressions occurred and what the listener could actually do with the ad, or face renewal at lower rates. The IAB Audio Viewability (Audibility) Standard already defines a valid audio impression as unmuted playback of at least two seconds, so inventory that is measured, not claimed, will command the premium.

Watch

Whether the 2026 podcast upfront produces a cross-format audio/video measurement standard, and whether Spotify extends skippable ads beyond the test.