Audioboom Posts a Record Quarter. The podcast company reported its strongest three months ever this week, with revenue of 23.8 million dollars for the quarter that ended in September, up seventeen percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit grew even faster than sales, and the company lifted its full-year forecast above what analysts had expected.
The results, released in mid-October, cap a year in which podcasting's business has quietly roared back. Audioboom runs a network of shows, sells their advertising, and operates a programmatic ad marketplace called Showcase that connects podcasters with more than two thousand brands. When that machinery hums, the whole industry feels it.
The numbers behind the quarter
The way Audioboom Posts a Record Quarter is worth a closer look, because higher-margin advertising products are doing more of the work. Gross profit climbed thirty percent to about five and a half million dollars, pushing the gross margin to twenty-three percent from twenty-one percent a year earlier, according to the company's trading update. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization hit 2.2 million dollars, an eighty-nine percent jump. The board now expects full-year adjusted earnings of at least seven point seven million dollars, ahead of market expectations, reported by trade publication RAIN News.
The nine-month picture is just as strong. Revenue for the first three quarters reached nearly seventy million dollars, up twenty-five percent from the same stretch last year, while gross profit rose thirty-two percent and adjusted earnings climbed eighty-four percent. Cash on hand stood at six point seven million dollars at the end of September, more than double the level a year earlier, giving the company room to keep hunting acquisitions.
Chief executive Stuart Last said in a statement that the quarter showed the strength of the company's platform model, crediting its strongest-ever content slate alongside record distribution and ad inventory. He added that most of the revenue growth was organic rather than coming from last year's acquisition of Adelicious, the UK podcast network.
Video is doing the heavy lifting
The audience numbers explain the money. Average monthly distribution hit one hundred ninety million downloads and video views, up forty-seven percent from about one hundred thirty million a year earlier. The company credits the growth of video podcasts — the format listeners increasingly watch rather than just hear, a shift GenZ NewZ explored in its look at the format wars — along with new content partnerships signed during 2026.
Those partnerships include the Pionaire Network and Brand Safe, while existing deals were renewed with shows including The Broski Report and Let's Not Meet. Locking in popular shows matters because advertisers follow audiences, and Audioboom's pitch is that it can put a brand in front of a loyal listenership at scale.
September brought an extra tailwind: political advertising ahead of the US midterm elections. Audioboom's politics and news network offers advertisers roughly two hundred fifty million available monthly impressions, and its Showcase marketplace pulled in close to ten million dollars in the quarter, up a fifth from a year earlier, reported by Podcast News Daily. Last told investors he expects that midterm-driven demand to continue into October. Notably, overall podcast ad loads have actually been shrinking even as spending grows, as recent benchmark data showed.
What it means for your feed
For listeners, the quarter is a window into where podcasting is headed. The money is flowing toward shows that film as well as record, which is why more of your favorite podcasts now arrive with a video version — and why experiments like AI-cloned host voices in ads keep getting funded. It also helps explain the ad reads multiplying in political and news shows as the midterms approach: campaigns are spending where the attention already is.
There is a sharper edge for the creators themselves. The company says its improving margins came partly from better revenue-share terms in its podcaster contracts — in plain terms, Audioboom kept a bigger slice of each ad dollar. And consolidation is accelerating: management says it still plans three to four meaningful acquisitions, meaning more independent networks are likely to end up inside bigger ones.
The broader signal, though, is that podcasting's slump is over. A format that looked shaky a few years ago just produced record revenue, record distribution and a raised forecast in the same quarter. Podcasting's money era is back — and Audioboom Posts a Record Quarter to prove it.
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