Podcasting pioneer Panoply took media watchers by surprise last fall when the Slate-born network shut down the entirety of its content operations to train its full focus on ad tech.
The move underscored a long-extant mismatch at the heart of the podcasting boom: While content production has flourished into a glut of wide-ranging titles with devoted audiences, the monetization needed to support that often-niche content has failed to keep pace. Advertisers are trying to figure out: Are podcasts like radio or like digital?
In a metrics-obsessed digital ads industry, podcasts have historically struggled to offer the kinds of targeting, measurement and packaged scale needed to sell advertisers on the types of smaller but more devoted audiences the medium tends to attract.

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